GAN Cocktail: mixing GANs without dataset access
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Abstract (arXiv)
Today's generative models are capable of synthesizing high-fidelity images, but each model specializes on a specific target domain. This raises the need for model merging: combining two or more pretrained generative models into a single unified one. In this work we tackle the problem of model merging, given two constraints that often come up in the real world: (1) no access to the original training data, and (2) without increasing the size of the neural network. To the best of our knowledge, model merging under these constraints has not been studied thus far. We propose a novel, two-stage solution. In the first stage, we transform the weights of all the models to the same parameter space by a technique we term model rooting. In the second stage, we merge the rooted models by averaging their weights and fine-tuning them for each specific domain, using only data generated by the original trained models. We demonstrate that our approach is superior to baseline methods and to existing transfer learning techniques, and investigate several applications.
Key facts. Cited by 8 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 39 of its 51 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 7 Jun 2021.
Builds on
39 of 51 references.
References · 39
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27 more
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Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2021: 1; 2022: 0; 2023: 1; 2024: 2; 2025: 3; 2026: 1.
8 papers.
- 2024Model Merging in LLMs, MLLMs, and Beyond: Methods, Theories, Applications and Opportunitiescited by 254
- 2021Sketch Your Own GANcited by 37
- 2024Diffusion Soup: Model Merging for Text-to-Image Diffusion Modelscited by 26
- 2025Sens-Merging: Sensitivity-Guided Parameter Balancing for Merging Large Language Modelscited by 16
- 2025Scalable Model Merging with Progressive Layer-wise Distillationcited by 10
- 2025LAMP: Data-Efficient Linear Affine Weight-Space Models for Parameter-Controlled 3D Shape Generation and Extrapolationcited by 4
- 2023Bayesian Transfer Learningcited by 3
- 2026Discovering Hidden Gems in Model Repositoriescited by 1
- 2026Discovering Hidden Gems in Model Repositories29 Jan 2026
- 2025LAMP: Data-Efficient Linear Affine Weight-Space Models for Parameter-Controlled 3D Shape Generation and Extrapolation26 Oct 2025
- 2025Scalable Model Merging with Progressive Layer-wise Distillation18 Feb 2025
- 2025Sens-Merging: Sensitivity-Guided Parameter Balancing for Merging Large Language Models18 Feb 2025
- 2024Model Merging in LLMs, MLLMs, and Beyond: Methods, Theories, Applications and Opportunities14 Aug 2024
- 2024Diffusion Soup: Model Merging for Text-to-Image Diffusion Models12 Jun 2024
- 2023Bayesian Transfer Learning20 Dec 2023
- 2021Sketch Your Own GAN5 Aug 2021