2025/03/06 by Ziyi Yang, Yang, Ziyi, Fanqi Wan +7 · 3 citations
Computer Science · #Computation and Language (cs.CL) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Focus (optics) #Key (lock) #Leverage (statistics) #Multi-source #Multimodal Machine Learning Applications #Natural Language Processing Techniques #Pipeline (software) #Preference #Suite #Topic Modeling
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2503.04222
published in arXiv (Cornell University) (Cornell University)
openalex publication_date 2025/03/06 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
We introduce FuseChat-3.0, a suite of large language models (LLMs) developed by integrating the strengths of heterogeneous source LLMs into more compact target LLMs. Our source models include the powerful Gemma-2-27B-it, Mistral-Large-Instruct-2407, Qwen-2.5-72B-Instruct, and Llama-3.1-70B-Instruct. For target models, we focus on three widely-used smaller variants-Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct, Gemma-2-9B-it, and Qwen-2.5-7B-Instruct-along with two ultra-compact options, Llama-3.2-3B-Instruct and Llama-3.2-1B-Instruct. To leverage the diverse capabilities of these source models, we develop a specialized data construction protocol tailored to various tasks and domains. The FuseChat-3.0 training pipeline consists of two key stages: (1) supervised fine-tuning (SFT) to align the target and source model distributions, and (2) Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) to apply preferences from multiple source LLMs to fine-tune the target model. The resulting FuseChat-3.0 models exhibit significant performance gains across tasks such as instruction following, general knowledge, mathematics, and coding. As illustrated in Figure 1, using Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct as the target model, our fusion approach achieves an average improvement of 6.8 points across 14 benchmarks. Moreover, it demonstrates remarkable gains of 37.1 points and 30.1 points on the instruction-following benchmarks AlpacaEval-2 and Arena-Hard, respectively. Our code, models, and datasets are available at https://github.com/SLIT-AI/FuseChat-3.0.