Paper deep dive: Evolutionary Optimization of Model Merging Recipes 

That was an excellent overview of not just Sakana's evolutionary methods to identify good merge candidates, but also the popular techniques TIES, DARE and Passthrough/Frankenmerge. Appreciate it as usual, Johno!

Oh my god, man you don't understand how happy I am for your storytelling about how things went in the timeline of developing on the idea of model merging up to this point, where it started how it went, that and how they were thinking about reasons why it works, etc.etc.. I want to get into this so that I understand the main ideas and be able to start working on these as well, but it's so hard to get to the root of things, it requires a huge amount of time to read and digest everything and slowly being able to put the pieces together, so boy do I mean it when I say thank you!

Hi Johno, at the beginning you said you're somewhat skeptical of model merging. Iiuc, your criticism is only about iterative merging for a given goal, which leads to overfitting. Or are you skeptical of the general concept of model merging? Thanks!

very great introduction! I can see a lot of efforts have been put into this video! It helps a lot to understand the paper! thank you for sharing!!