modelDNA: Calibrated Lineage Verification and Merge Decomposition from Sampled Weight Fingerprints

Abstract

The lineage graph of open-weight language models is self-reported: Hugging Face's base_model metadata field is optional and unverified, and over 60% of Hub models document no parentage at all. Methods for detecting lineage from weights exist in the research literature, but each ships as paper code tied to one signal and one experiment; when a provenance dispute breaks, the analysis is redone by hand. This report describes modelDNA, a tool that fingerprints a model from roughly 100-300 MB of ranged HTTP reads (instead of a full 15 GB download for a 7B model), compares the fingerprint against a reference database of foundation models across four published signal families, and returns one of eight verdict classes with a calibrated probability, preferring honest abstention to confident error. On a benchmark of 15 real Hub models with org-documented parentage, judged against 8 candidate bases (13 positives, 107 hard negatives), the system achieves AUROC 1.0, zero false positives at its reporting threshold, and 13/13 correct top-1 parent attribution. The report's second contribution is merge decomposition. Every mainstream weight-merging method is (near-)linear per tensor, and fingerprint sample positions are deterministic functions of tensor identity, so a merged model's fingerprint is the same linear combination of its parents'fingerprints. Mixture weights can therefore be recovered from fingerprints alone by sum-to-one constrained least squares. Against merges with published mergekit configurations as ground truth, the method recovers a slerp merge's layer-interpolation curves at r = 0.999 and a dare_ties merge's mixture weights to within 0.011 of the published values, without downloading any weights beyond the fingerprints. All fingerprints, benchmarks, and the inferred lineage graph of 55 models are public and reproducible offline.