Is Depth Heterogeneity a Barrier to Model Merging?

Model merging offers a way to combine the capabilities of several networks at test time without retraining or additional finetuning, but most merging methods assume identical architectures. Depth differences are commonly viewed as a major obstacle because they remove clear layer correspondences. We test this assumption by merging residual networks that differ only in depth, using a simple training-free pipeline based on identity expansion and permutation alignment. Across both same-task and multitask image classification experiments, heterogeneous merges closely match homogeneous ones. The results suggest that, for residual networks, depth mismatch is not the main barrier to effective model merging, and that the main difficulty in model merging comes from aligning independently trained weights in a homogeneous setting.