Model Fusion via Retrofitting

Abstract

Model fusion seeks to combine independently trained neural networks into a single model without retraining, but is complicated by representational divergence arising from permutation invariance, random initialization, and heterogeneous training data. Existing methods struggle particularly in zero-shot settings under non-IID data distributions, and are often limited to specific architectures or pairwise fusion. We introduce a neuron-centric family of fusion algorithms that frames fusion as a principled representation-matching problem: intermediate neurons across parent models are grouped into target representations, which the fused model's corresponding sub-networks are then trained to approximate. Unlike prior work, our approach incorporates neuron attribution scores to bias alignment toward salient features, and can be applied to any architecture modularizable as a DAG of levels -- empirically validated on VGGs, ResNets, and ViTs. Experiments across standard benchmarks show consistent improvements over existing fusion methods, with the largest gains in zero-shot and non-IID scenarios. Code is available at https://github.com/AndrewSpano/model-fusion-via-retrofitting.