KIND: Knowledge Integration and Diversion for Training Decomposable Models

Abstract: Pre-trained models have become the preferred backbone due to the increasing complexity of model parameters. However, traditional pre-trained models often face deployment challenges due to their fixed sizes, and are prone to negative transfer when discrepancies arise between training tasks and target tasks. To address this, we propose KIND, a novel pre-training method designed to construct decomposable models. KIND integrates knowledge by incorporating Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) as a structural constraint, with each basic component represented as a combination of a column vector, singular value, and row vector from U, \Sigma, and V^\top matrices. These components are categorized into learngenes for encapsulating class-agnostic knowledge and tailors for capturing class-specific knowledge, with knowledge diversion facilitated by a class gate mechanism during training. Extensive experiments demonstrate that models pre-trained with KIND can be decomposed into learngenes and tailors, which can be adaptively recombined for diverse resource-constrained deployments. Moreover, for tasks with large domain shifts, transferring only learngenes with task-agnostic knowledge, when combined with randomly initialized tailors, effectively mitigates domain shifts. Code will be made available at https://github.com/Te4P0t/KIND.