ACE-Merging: Data-Free Model Merging with Adaptive Covariance Estimation

Bo Xu, Haotian Wu, Hehai Lin, Weiquan Huang, Beier Zhu, Yao Shu, Chengwei Qin; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2026, pp. 29472-29482

Model merging aims to combine multiple task-specific experts into a single model, but inter-task interference often causes severe degradation, especially when the experts are trained on heterogeneous objectives. Existing data-free methods are practical, yet largely rely on parameter-space heuristics without explicitly modeling task statistics. In this paper, we show that under a local linear approximation, the input covariance of each task can be estimated directly from its fine-tuning update, providing a principled bridge between parameter changes and data geometry in the data-free setting. Based on this insight, we propose ACE-Merging, a closed-form model merging framework with adaptive covariance normalization, a collective structural prior, and spectral refinement. Across both vision and language benchmarks, ACE-Merging achieves strong overall performance among data-free baselines. In particular, it improves the average score on GPT-2 by more than 4 points over prior methods, while also delivering strong scalability and competitive efficiency. Our code is available at https://github.com/unravel-xu/ACE-Merging/tree/main.