RESEARCH

CORE MACHINE LEARNING

Souper-Model: How Simple Arithmetic Unlocks State-of-the-Art LLM Performance

November 18, 2025

Abstract

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across diverse domains, but their training remains resource- and time-intensive, requiring massive compute power and careful orchestration of training procedures. Model souping—the practice of averaging weights from multiple models of the same architecture—has emerged as a promising pre- and post-training technique that can enhance performance without expensive retraining. In this paper, we introduce Soup Of Category Experts (SoCE), a principled approach for model souping that utilizes benchmark composition to identify optimal model candidates and applies non-uniform weighted averaging to maximize performance. Contrary to previous uniform-averaging approaches, our method leverages the observation that benchmark categories often exhibit low inter-correlations in model performance. SoCE identifies "expert" models for each weakly-correlated category cluster and combines them using optimized weighted averaging rather than uniform weights. We demonstrate that the proposed method improves performance and robustness across multiple domains, including multilingual capabilities, tool calling, and math and achieves state-of-the-art results on the Berkeley Function Calling Leaderboard.

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AUTHORS

Written by

Shalini Maiti *

Amar Budhiraja *

Bhavul Gauri

Gaurav Chaurasia

Anton Protopopov

Alexis Audran-Reiss

Michael Slater

Despoina Magka

Tatiana Shavrina

Roberta Raileanu

Yoram Bachrach

* Equal authorship

Publisher

arXiv

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