Model merging provides a cost-effective and data-efficient combination of specialized deep neural networks through parameter integration. This technique leverages expert models across downstream tasks without requiring retraining. Most model merging approaches critically depend on scaling hyper-parameters $λ$, which weight each model's contribution globally or individually. Principled approaches for setting scaling factors without accessing any data (data-free) are scarce, often leading researchers to tune $λ$ using privileged data from the evaluation set, which is obviously unfeasible in practice. To address this limitation, we introduce Weight Weaving, a plug-and-play technique that pools model weights across $λ$ values search space using user-defined pooling functions, such as averaging, random selection, or even existing model merging methods. Our method demonstrates high modularity, imposing minimal constraints on the search space. It operates orthogonally to existing model merging methods and eliminates evaluation data requirements. We validate Weight Weaving across three ViT variants in three experimental setups: vision multi-task learning, vision continual learning, and domain generalization. Our method consistently improves the performance of several model merging methods, achieving average accuracy gains of up to 15.9 percentage points in a data-free setting.

This paper introduces a continual learning approach named MagMax, which utilizes model merging to enable large pre-trained models to continuously learn from new data without forgetting previously acquired knowledge. Distinct from traditional continual learning methods that aim to reduce forgetting during task training, MagMax combines sequential fine-tuning with a maximum magnitude weight selection for effective knowledge integration across tasks. Our initial contribution is an extensive examination of model merging techniques, revealing that simple approaches like weight averaging and random weight selection surprisingly hold up well in various continual learning contexts. More importantly, we present MagMax, a novel model-merging strategy that enables continual learning of large pre-trained models for successive tasks. Our thorough evaluation demonstrates the superiority of MagMax in various scenarios, including class- and domain-incremental learning settings.