K-Merge: Online Continual Merging of Adapters for On-device Large Language Models
Donald Shenaj University of Pisa, Ondrej Bohdal Samsung Research, Taha Ceritli TWG AI, Mete Ozay, Pietro Zanuttigh Universita' degli studi di Padova, Umberto Michieli Canva
原文摘要
On-device deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs) frequently leverages Low-Rank Adapters (LoRAs) to support diverse downstream tasks under tight resource constraints. To address the limited storage capacity of mobile devices, recent works have explored model merging techniques to fuse multiple LoRAs into a single one. In practice, however, LoRAs are often delivered incrementally, as users request support for new tasks (e.g., novel problem types or languages). This scenario introduces a new challenge: on-device online continual merging, where the objective is to incorporate new LoRAs while preserving the performance on previously supported tasks. In this paper, we propose a data-free and computationally efficient strategy for selecting and merging LoRAs when a new one becomes available, assuming the device can store only a limited number of adapters. Extensive experiments across real-world tasks demonstrate the superiority of our approach compared to alternative strategies while adhering to the storage budget and compute limitations of on-device settings. The project page is available at: https://donaldssh.github.io/K-Merge.
cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表