BETTER THAN GOLIATH?!

I've merged Euryale-lora that I made with Xwin and then merged it with itself in goliath-style merge using mergekit. The resulting model performs better than goliath on my tests(note: performance on tests is not necessarily performance in practice). Test it, have fun with it. This is a sister model of Premerge-EX-EX-123B.

Prompt format

Alpaca.

Ideas behind it

Since the creation of Goliath I was wondering if it was possible to make something even better. I've tried linear, passthrough, SLERP, TIES-merging models, but I could not recreate the greatness of goliath, at least not in a way that I liked in practical use. I knew about the existence of LORAs but I didn't know how well they performed. I created a model named Gembo by merging a shitton of LORAs together, and surprisingly it worked! In fact it worked so well that it was the best model on my benchmarks until now. When I found a tool named LORD, which can extract LORA from any model, I knew I could do something even better.

I've extracted LORA from Euryale, then from Xwin and began testing. Merging Euryale-lora to Xwin and the other way around, created better models, which outperformed their parents:

Results seemed promising, so I continued testing, merging it in goliath-like way in different orders(EX=Euryale+LORAXwin; XE=Xwin+LORAEuryale). The results were even more surprising:

Contrary to my expectations, merging two different models was suboptimal in this case. Selfmerge of Euryale-LORAXwin did beat all of the other merges on SP tests(creative writing), making it the highest scoring model on those tests that I've tested so far, and selfmerge of Xwin-LORAEuryale(this model) had highest score overall.

What it means

Potentially in the future we can get better models by controlled merging of LORAs.

Benchmarks

NeoEvalPlusN

My meme benchmark.