MergeHEIR: Mitigating Multimodal Hallucinations as the Tax of Model Merging

Jinyu Li, Hao Fang, Zhiming Zhang, Jiawei Kong, Bin Chen +1

Model merging consolidates task-specialized experts into a single deployable model. However, we show that such capability consolidation incurs a merging tax of increased hallucination: across 8 model-merging methods, every merged checkpoint exhibits a higher hallucination rate than the average of its constituent experts. An intuitive approach is to adapt existing hallucination-mitigation methods to the post-merge model, yet this unconstrained adaptation disrupts inherited capabilities, creating a tension between hallucination mitigation and expertise retention. To tackle this challenge, we introduce MergeHEIR, a post-merge adaptation framework designed to reduce this merging tax while preserving expertise inherited from initial experts. Using small expert-task calibration sets, MergeHEIR constructs layer-wise null-space projectors via SVD from task-specific activations collected from the merged checkpoint, and periodically projects the accumulated post-merge displacement onto the resulting null spaces to preserve inherited expertise. Theoretically, we establish minimum-distortion and maximum-dimensionality guarantees, characterize the threshold-controlled adaptation-retention…