Upcycling Language Models for Multiple Specialized Domains

Abstract

Effective multi-domain adaptation of large language models requires prioritizing relevant domain knowledge while minimizing interference from irrelevant domains. Existing approaches commonly use Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) to train a separate adapter for each domain and combine these adapters within one model. However, they either weight adapters equally regardless of the input domain or dynamically weight adapters while still activating all of them including irrelevant ones. Additionally, while efficient, their low-rank structure limits performance. In contrast, upcycling is a model expansion method that adds experts and a router to a dense Transformer layer offering larger capacity than LoRA approaches. In this paper, we propose Domain-Specialized Upcycling (DS-Upcycling) for multi-domain adaptation. We introduce a new domain-aware supervision that allows the router to effectively learn to distinguish domains by selecting the appropriate experts. During fine-tuning on each new domain, we update only the corresponding expert and router while freezing all other parameters. Experiments show that our method achieves the highest average performance across the adapted domains compared to baselines while retaining general performance. With just 256 examples per domain for router supervision, DS-Upcycling achieves 90-98% routing accuracy after adaptation compared with 43-70% for routers trained without our approach.