aiqbench analysis
This research addresses representation bias in merged decoder-based LLMs, introducing DARTS to correct hidden state drift specifically at high-entropy token positions critical for generation quality. By leveraging an entropy-weighted loss function and position-dependent additive biases, the method achieves significant performance gains on code and reasoning benchmarks with negligible parameter overhead. The approach effectively extends representation bias mitigation strategies from encoder-based vision models to the autoregressive architecture of large language models.
DARTS: Decoder-Aware Representation Tuning via Surgery for Model Merging
arXiv:2608.28547v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: 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 accumulate across token positions, requiring position-dependent correction; and (2) not all token positions are equally important, i.e., high-entropy (decision-critical) positions matter far more than low-entropy ones. To address these challenges, we propose Decoder-Aware Representation Tuning via Surgery (DARTS). DARTS employs a novel entropy-weighted L1 loss to upweight correction at high-entropy positions where errors most affect generation quality, and a per-position additive bias that captures position-dependent error without overparameterization. We perform extensive evaluation on three domains: code generation (HumanEval), mathematical reasoning (GSM8K), and instruction following (AlpacaEval) on Llama-2-7B models, and show DARTS achieves significant improvement over the standard surgery approach while adding negligible parameters ($0.1\%$ of total parameters).
Abstract: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 accumulate across token positions, requiring position-dependent correction; and (2) not all token positions are equally important, i.e., high-entropy (decision-critical) positions matter far more than low-entropy ones. To address these challenges, we propose Decoder-Aware Representation Tuning via Surgery (DARTS). DARTS employs a novel entropy-weighted L1 loss to upweight correction at high-entropy positions where errors most affect generation quality, and a per-position additive bias that captures position-dependent error without overparameterization. We perform extensive evaluation on three domains: code generation (HumanEval), mathematical reasoning (GSM8K), and instruction following (AlpacaEval) on Llama-2-7B models, and show DARTS achieves significant improvement over the standard surgery approach while adding negligible parameters ($0.1\%$ of total parameters).
Machine Learning (cs.LG)
arXiv:2608.28547 [cs.LG]
(or arXiv:2608.28547v1 [cs.LG] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.28547 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
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