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arXiv · 2510.22993

Can Language Models Compose Skills In-Context?

Zidong Liu·Zhuoyan Xu·Zhenmei Shi·Yingyu Liang
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Abstract

Composing basic skills from simple tasks to accomplish composite tasks is crucial for modern intelligent systems. We investigate the in-context composition ability of language models to perform composite tasks that combine basic skills demonstrated in in-context examples. This is more challenging than the standard setting, where skills and their composition can be learned in training. We conduct systematic experiments on various representative open-source language models, utilizing linguistic and logical tasks designed to probe composition abilities. The results reveal that simple task examples can have a surprising negative impact on the performance, because the models generally struggle to recognize and assemble the skills correctly, even with Chain-of-Thought examples. Theoretical analysis further shows that it is crucial to align examples with the corresponding steps in the composition. This inspires a method for the probing tasks, whose improved performance provides positive support for our insights.

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Zidong Liu, Zhuoyan Xu, Zhenmei Shi, Yingyu Liang. 2025-10-27. Can Language Models Compose Skills In-Context?. https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.22993

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