GLOBA: Rethinking Parameter Conflicts in Model Merging

Abstract

Model merging serves as a training-free technique that combines multiple task-specific models into a unified multi-task model, but parameter conflicts often lead to performance drops. Previous methods flatten weight matrices into one-dimensional vectors, losing the inherent structural information of their row and column spaces. We mathematically prove and experimentally validate that parameter conflicts arise from non-orthogonal components of task vectors, while orthogonal components are conflict-free. Furthermore, we find that non-orthogonal components can contain both harmful conflicts and beneficial synergies. To precisely locate parameter conflicts and extract orthogonal components, we propose GLOBA (GLObal Basis Analysis Framework), which projects task vectors onto a global basis to align them within a unified coordinate system and construct a task interaction matrix. Following energy-based pruning, we divide parameters into five types based on the orthogonal relationships between the row spaces and column spaces of task vectors. Experiments on three fine-tuned models (mathematics, coding, and instruction-following) using LLaMA-2-7B and LLaMA-2-13B demonstrate significant performance gains through selective retention of beneficial parameters and removal of conflicting ones.