Pith Number

pith:G5PHVFID

pith:2026:G5PHVFIDGAADWC23K6NVBP63LN

not attested not anchored not stored refs pending

Demystifying Mergeability: Interpretable Properties to Predict Model Merging Success

Bo Zhao, Emanuele Rodol\`a, Luca Zhou, Rose Yu

Gradient alignment between fine-tuned models is the strongest predictor of successful merging across methods and tasks.

arxiv:2601.22285 v7 · 2026-01-29 · cs.LG

Open paper page JSON Open Graph Bundle Merged state Verified badge What is a Pith Number?

Add to your LaTeX paper

\usepackage{pith}
\pithnumber{G5PHVFIDGAADWC23K6NVBP63LN}

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Record completeness

1 Bitcoin timestamp

2 Internet Archive

3 Author claim open · sign in to claim

4 Citations open

5 Replications open

✓ Portable graph bundle live · download bundle · merged state

The bundle contains the canonical record plus signed events. A mirror can host it anywhere and recompute the same current state with the deterministic merge algorithm.

Claims

C1strongest claim

Crucially, however, gradient alignment metrics consistently emerge as the most fundamental signals of compatibility.

C2weakest assumption

That the chosen set of interpretable pairwise metrics (such as gradient L2 distance) plus L1-regularized linear optimization is sufficient to identify the true drivers of merge success without missing key unmeasured factors.

C3one line summary

Mergeability is not intrinsic to models but depends on merging method and tasks, with gradient alignment as the key predictive signal uncovered via interpretable metrics.

Cited by

3 papers in Pith

Beyond Perplexity: A Geometric and Spectral Study of Low-Rank Pre-Training

Model Merging: Foundations and Algorithms

Receipt and verification

First computed	2026-05-20T01:05:07.281625Z
Builder	pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1
Signature	Pith Ed25519 (`pith-v1-2026-05`) · public key
Schema	pith-number/v1.0

Canonical hash

375e7a950330003b0b5b579b50bfdb5b67b3a269208585bf5dd3c0aa84c7e4d7

Aliases

arxiv: 2601.22285 · arxiv_version: 2601.22285v7 · doi: 10.48550/arxiv.2601.22285 · pith_short_12: G5PHVFIDGAAD · pith_short_16: G5PHVFIDGAADWC23 · pith_short_8: G5PHVFID

Agent API

Resolver JSON Graph JSON Events JSON Schema Signing key

Verify this Pith Number yourself

curl -sH 'Accept: application/ld+json' https://pith.science/pith/G5PHVFIDGAADWC23K6NVBP63LN \
  | jq -c '.canonical_record' \
  | python3 -c "import sys,json,hashlib; b=json.dumps(json.loads(sys.stdin.read()), sort_keys=True, separators=(',',':'), ensure_ascii=False).encode(); print(hashlib.sha256(b).hexdigest())"
# expect: 375e7a950330003b0b5b579b50bfdb5b67b3a269208585bf5dd3c0aa84c7e4d7

Canonical record JSON

{
  "metadata": {
    "abstract_canon_sha256": "12d878280646b316ab674d039cd7d2ac0928643b7de47e413c5b730ca4cfa0ba",
    "cross_cats_sorted": [],
    "license": "http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/",
    "primary_cat": "cs.LG",
    "submitted_at": "2026-01-29T20:00:26Z",
    "title_canon_sha256": "f7b423489f9f9ad0a232ce96a629dcadcaf3bb5155bc709c0dc487ee8cd977f3"
  },
  "schema_version": "1.0",
  "source": {
    "id": "2601.22285",
    "kind": "arxiv",
    "version": 7
  }
}