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Model Merging Scaling Laws in Large Language Models

5 Pith papers cite this work. Polarity classification is still indexing.

5 Pith papers citing it
abstract

We study empirical scaling laws for language model merging measured by cross-entropy. Despite its wide practical use, merging lacks a quantitative rule that predicts returns as we add experts or scale the model size. We identify a compact power law that links model size and expert number: the size-dependent floor decreases with model capacity, while the merging tail exhibits clear diminishing returns in the number of experts. The law holds in-domain and cross-domain, tightly fits measured curves across diverse architectures and methods (Average, TA, TIES, DARE), and explains two robust regularities: most gains arrive early, and variability shrinks as more experts are included. Building on this, we present a simple theory that explains why gains fall roughly as 1/k and links the floor and tail to properties of the base model and the diversity across domains. This law enables predictive planning: estimate how many experts are needed to reach a target loss, decide when to stop adding experts, and trade off scaling the base model versus adding experts under a fixed budget--turning merging from heuristic practice into a computationally efficient, planable alternative to multitask training. This suggests a scaling principle for distributed generative AI: predictable gains can be achieved by composing specialists, offering a complementary path toward AGI-level systems.

citation-role summary

background 1 other 1

citation-polarity summary

fields

cs.LG 4 cs.CL 1

years

2026 4 2024 1

polarities

background 1 unclear 1

representative citing papers

FeatCal: Feature Calibration for Post-Merging Models

cs.LG · 2026-05-13 · conditional · novelty 7.0

FeatCal reduces feature drift in merged models via layer-wise closed-form calibration on a small dataset, outperforming prior post-merging methods on CLIP and GLUE benchmarks with high sample efficiency.

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