Merging Models with Fisher-Weighted Averaging. (arXiv:2111.09832v2 [cs.LG] UPDATED)

Averaging the parameters of models that have the same architecture and
initialization can provide a means of combining their respective capabilities.
In this paper, we take the perspective that this "merging" operation can be
seen as choosing parameters that approximately maximize the joint likelihood of
the posteriors of the models' parameters. Computing a simple average of the
models' parameters therefore corresponds to making an isotropic Gaussian
approximation to their posteriors. We develop an alternative merging procedure
based on the Laplace …

arxiv lg merging