Paper Detail

Label-Free Cross-Task LoRA Merging with Null-Space Compression

Wonyoung Lee, Wooseong Jeong, Kuk-Jin Yoon

arxiv Score 11.8

Published 2026-03-27 · First seen 2026-03-31

General AI

Abstract

Model merging combines independently fine-tuned checkpoints without joint multi-task training. In the era of foundation-model, fine-tuning with Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) is prevalent, making LoRA merging a promising target. Existing approaches can work in homogeneous settings where all target tasks are classification but often fail when tasks span classification and regression. Approaches using entropy-based surrogates do not apply to regression and are costly for large language models due to long token sequences. We introduce Null-Space Compression (NSC) Merging, a label-free, output-agnostic method that sets merge weights from adapter geometry. Our key observation is that during LoRA finetuning the down-projection factor $A$ in $ΔW = BA$ compresses its null space, and the compression correlates with performance. NSC uses this as an optimization signal for merging that can generalize across classification, regression, and sequence generation. NSC achieves state-of-the-art performance across twenty heterogeneous vision tasks with balanced gains where prior methods overfit subsets of tasks. It also outperforms baselines on six NLI benchmarks and on vision-language evaluations for VQA and image captioning, demonstrating scalability and effectiveness.

Workflow Status

Review status
pending
Role
unreviewed
Read priority
now
Vote
Not set.
Saved
no
Collections
Not filed yet.
Next action
Not filled yet.

Reading Brief

No structured notes yet. Add `summary_sections`, `why_relevant`, `claim_impact`, or `next_action` in `papers.jsonl` to enrich this view.

Why It Surfaced

No ranking explanation is available yet.

Tags

No tags.

BibTeX

@article{lee2026label,
  title = {Label-Free Cross-Task LoRA Merging with Null-Space Compression},
  author = {Wonyoung Lee and Wooseong Jeong and Kuk-Jin Yoon},
  year = {2026},
  abstract = {Model merging combines independently fine-tuned checkpoints without joint multi-task training. In the era of foundation-model, fine-tuning with Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) is prevalent, making LoRA merging a promising target. Existing approaches can work in homogeneous settings where all target tasks are classification but often fail when tasks span classification and regression. Approaches using entropy-based surrogates do not apply to regression and are costly for large language models due to l},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.26317},
  keywords = {cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.LG},
  eprint = {2603.26317},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
}

Metadata

{}