Generative Skill Composition for LLM Agents

· ArXiv · AI/CL/LG ·

The paper frames skill selection for LLM agents as a generative composition problem over reusable task skills.

Categories: Research

Excerpt

Recent LLM agents benefit from skills for solving complex tasks. Skills encapsulate modular packages of procedural knowledge and instructions for performing specialized tasks, such as setting up a sandboxed environment, running a test suite, or refactoring a function across multiple files. As skill libraries grow and become reusable across tasks and domains, selecting an appropriate skill composition has emerged as a central bottleneck. Existing approaches fall into two categories. One exposes the agent's reasoning to the entire skill collection; the other performs skill retrieval via embeddings or LLM-based rerankers. Both provide useful insights; however, they miss the structural nature of skill composition, which is a joint decision over which skills, how many, and in what order -- three dimensions that cannot be decoupled. We formalize this as structured skill composition: given a task and a skill library, predict an executable skill plan that jointly specifies the activated subset, count, and execution order. We propose SkillComposer, which instantiates structured skill composition as task-conditioned skill sequence prediction. SkillComposer uses a constrained autoregressive decoder over skill identifiers, so subset, count, and order emerge jointly from a single decoding pass, and dependencies between successive skills are captured naturally. We build a training set of task-composition pairs from a real, human-curated skill library. We then evaluate SkillComposer along t