SkillSmith: Learning to Compose Parametric Skills and Textual Knowledge

Published
Source
arXiv
Paper number
789
Field
LLMs / NLP
arXiv ID
2607.27497

Key points

  • It treats model weights, or prefix cache, as a modality on par with text so that the LLM can read and reason over both together.
  • SkillSmith takes source-task weights, text metadata, and a target description as input, and directly synthesizes new prefix weights tailored to the target.
  • It builds a new synthetic dataset called Composite SNI to verify the effectiveness of combining text and weights on new tasks that require composing skills from two tasks.
  • With 4B Gemma 3, it beats all baselines that use only text or only weights, and on MMLU-ProX it even beats methods based on downstream fine-tuning.
  • It shows that retrieval-based methods can synthesize weights effectively in noisy environments even without exact source mapping.

Paper links

External research summaries. These are not HDATF publications or measured product results.

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