Improving Training Efficiency and Reducing Maintenance Costs via Language Specific Model Merging

Abstract: Fine-tuning a task-specific multilingual LLM involves training the model on a multilingual dataset with examples in all the required languages. Updating one or more supported languages with additional data or adding support for a new language involves retraining the model, which can be computationally inefficient and creates a severe maintenance bottleneck. Recent research on merging multilingual multitask models has shown promise in terms of improved quality, but its computational and maintenance efficiency remains unstudied. In this work, we provide the first focused analysis of this merging strategy from an efficiency perspective, evaluating it across three independent tasks. We demonstrate significant efficiency gains while maintaining parity in terms of quality: this merging approach reduces the initial training time by up to 50\%. We also demonstrate that updating an individual language and re-merging as part of model maintenance reduces training costs by more than 60\%, compared to re-training the full multilingual model. We show this on both public and proprietary industry datasets confirming that the approach works well for industrial use cases in addition to academic settings already studied in previous work.