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Naive SLERP Fails Both Aggressively and Conservatively on Qwen2.5 Instruct x Coder Merges, and TIES Works: An Observation-Driven Case Study

Chen, Ho Yiing · 2026-05-22 · Zenodo

doi:10.5281/zenodo.20346628 · PDF

Abstract

© Copyright 2026 Chen, Ho Yiing (ORCID: 0009-0006-6816-9891), Independent researcher, charenix.com. All rights reserved by the author. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0. Three merges of qwen2.5-7B-Instruct with qwen2.5-Coder-7B-Instruct are compared on a five-prompt diagnostic panel: v1 — aggressive SLERP (t ramped 0.1 to 0.9 across blocks). Fails with 5 distinct failure modes: persona drift, repetition loop, script drift (Traditional to Simplified Chinese), factual regression on a Python claim, register collapse. v2 — conservative SLERP (t ≈ 0.20 everywhere). Fa

Chen, Ho Yiing (norika) · Independent Researcher, Taiwan · ORCID 0009-0006-6816-9891