DARTS: Decoder-Aware Representation Tuning via Surgery for Model Merging
Model merging combines multiple task-specific fine-tuned LLMs into a single multi-task model without additional training. However, merged models are known to suffer from representation bias: systematic drift between the merged model's hidden states and those of each individual source model. Prior work (Yang et al., 2024a) study and mitigate this bias for encoder-based vision models using a lightweight correction module trained with L1 loss. However, such bias is not studied for decoder models due to their autoregressive nature. We analyze the problem of representation bias in decoder models, and show two challenges absent in encoders: (1) the causal attention mask causes bias to accumulat...
| Authors | Aaryan Ajay Sharma, Sai Nishanth Padala, Seganrasan Subramanian |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 28 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 28 August 2026 |
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