@inproceedings{ling-etal-2026-reusable,
title = "Reusable Experiences: Latent Routing and Modular Composition in {LLM}s",
author = "Ling, Shuai and
Liao, Lizi and
Jiang, Dongmei and
Guan, Weili",
editor = "Liakata, Maria and
Moreira, Viviane P. and
Zhang, Jiajun and
Jurgens, David",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
month = jul,
year = "2026",
address = "San Diego, California, United States",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2026.acl-long.1388/",
pages = "30087--30100",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-390-6",
abstract = "Large language models (LLMs) have remarkable capabilities, but adapting them to specialized domains poses a fundamental question: \textit{how should accumulated experience be represented and leveraged?} Existing approaches represent experience either as explicit textual artifacts in prompts (\textit{e.g.}, retrieved documents or dialogues) or implicitly within model weights via fine-tuning (\textit{e.g.}, LoRA adapters). However, textual methods are limited by context windows and cannot internalize knowledge, while parametric fine-tuning yields one adapter per task with minimal cross-task skill reuse. We propose \textbf{ReX} (\textbf{Re}usable e\textbf{X}perience), an experience-centric adaptation framework that treats latent experiences {---} recurring reasoning patterns and skills {---} as fundamental units for LLM specialization. Our method learns a shared Experience Bank of foundational skill vectors and uses a VAE-based encoder to map each input to a low-dimensional experience code. An Experience Router then dynamically composes the relevant skill vectors from this bank into a lightweight adapter for that input. By reusing skills across inputs, \textbf{ReX} enables implicit knowledge sharing across tasks without any explicit task identifiers. Experiments on multi-task NLP benchmarks show that this approach outperforms standard task-specific fine-tuning, yielding improved generalization through flexible skill reuse. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/iLearn-Lab/ACL26-ReX}."
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<abstract>Large language models (LLMs) have remarkable capabilities, but adapting them to specialized domains poses a fundamental question: how should accumulated experience be represented and leveraged? Existing approaches represent experience either as explicit textual artifacts in prompts (e.g., retrieved documents or dialogues) or implicitly within model weights via fine-tuning (e.g., LoRA adapters). However, textual methods are limited by context windows and cannot internalize knowledge, while parametric fine-tuning yields one adapter per task with minimal cross-task skill reuse. We propose ReX (Reusable eXperience), an experience-centric adaptation framework that treats latent experiences — recurring reasoning patterns and skills — as fundamental units for LLM specialization. Our method learns a shared Experience Bank of foundational skill vectors and uses a VAE-based encoder to map each input to a low-dimensional experience code. An Experience Router then dynamically composes the relevant skill vectors from this bank into a lightweight adapter for that input. By reusing skills across inputs, ReX enables implicit knowledge sharing across tasks without any explicit task identifiers. Experiments on multi-task NLP benchmarks show that this approach outperforms standard task-specific fine-tuning, yielding improved generalization through flexible skill reuse. Code is available at https://github.com/iLearn-Lab/ACL26-ReX.</abstract>
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T Reusable Experiences: Latent Routing and Modular Composition in LLMs
%A Ling, Shuai
%A Liao, Lizi
%A Jiang, Dongmei
%A Guan, Weili
%Y Liakata, Maria
%Y Moreira, Viviane P.
%Y Zhang, Jiajun
%Y Jurgens, David
%S Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
%D 2026
%8 July
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C San Diego, California, United States
%@ 979-8-89176-390-6
%F ling-etal-2026-reusable
%X Large language models (LLMs) have remarkable capabilities, but adapting them to specialized domains poses a fundamental question: how should accumulated experience be represented and leveraged? Existing approaches represent experience either as explicit textual artifacts in prompts (e.g., retrieved documents or dialogues) or implicitly within model weights via fine-tuning (e.g., LoRA adapters). However, textual methods are limited by context windows and cannot internalize knowledge, while parametric fine-tuning yields one adapter per task with minimal cross-task skill reuse. We propose ReX (Reusable eXperience), an experience-centric adaptation framework that treats latent experiences — recurring reasoning patterns and skills — as fundamental units for LLM specialization. Our method learns a shared Experience Bank of foundational skill vectors and uses a VAE-based encoder to map each input to a low-dimensional experience code. An Experience Router then dynamically composes the relevant skill vectors from this bank into a lightweight adapter for that input. By reusing skills across inputs, ReX enables implicit knowledge sharing across tasks without any explicit task identifiers. Experiments on multi-task NLP benchmarks show that this approach outperforms standard task-specific fine-tuning, yielding improved generalization through flexible skill reuse. Code is available at https://github.com/iLearn-Lab/ACL26-ReX.
%U https://aclanthology.org/2026.acl-long.1388/
%P 30087-30100
Markdown (Informal)
[Reusable Experiences: Latent Routing and Modular Composition in LLMs](https://aclanthology.org/2026.acl-long.1388/) (Ling et al., ACL 2026)
ACL
- Shuai Ling, Lizi Liao, Dongmei Jiang, and Weili Guan. 2026. Reusable Experiences: Latent Routing and Modular Composition in LLMs. In Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 30087–30100, San Diego, California, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.