arXiv Computation and Language

SPT: Skills as Pre-Training Data for Agentic Language Models

The paper introduces Skill Pre-Training (SPT), a mid‑training approach that uses public skill packages as data for agentic language models. By applying causal language modeling to a collection called SkillCorpus and employing a Reference Insert strategy to keep file relationships intact, SPT improves agentic performance across various model sizes while largely preserving general capabilities. Experiments also show that mixing skill data with general corpora yields further benefits.

arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 10

SkillAligner: Treating Retrieved Skills as Adaptable Drafts at Execution Time

arXiv:2608. 06880v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: General-purpose skills promise reusable procedural knowledge for language agents, yet semantic relevance does not guarantee execution utility: a retrieved skill may encode assumptions that conflict with the current task, execution environment, or other retrieved skills.

By Qinfeng Li, Dalin He, Yuntai Bao, Ying Yang, Ruoxi Chen, Xinyan Yu, Lizhou Liang, Ge Su, Wenqi Zhang, Xuhong Zhang
arXiv AI
Aug 25

SkillAlchemy: Open-World Agent Skill Creation

arXiv:2608.23417v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agent skills are reusable procedural artifacts that extend language agents with specialized workflows, tool conventions, and domain behaviors at infere...

By Hengjun Wang, Shuyue Wei, Boyi Liu, Jun Yang, Yongxin Tong
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Aug 11

SKILLER: Language-Level Reinforcement Learning for Reusable Skill Extraction in Small Language Models

Agent skills represent a standardized format for packaging procedural knowledge and domain expertise, serving within agent harness systems as an essential mechanism to continually constrain a language model's behavior space for repeatable, high-quality task execution. However, because strong closed-source models entail high inference costs, current popular agent harnesses, such as Codex and OpenClaw, remain prohibitively expensive when deploying these skills to accomplish real-world tasks.

arXiv AI
Jun 9

Skill Retrieval Augmentation for Agentic AI

arXiv:2604. 24594v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: As large language models (LLMs) evolve into agentic problem solvers, they increasingly rely on external, reusable skills to handle tasks beyond their native parametric capabilities.

By Weihang Su, Jianming Long, Qingyao Ai, Qiaozhi He, Yichen Tang, Changyue Wang, Yiteng Tu, Yingbo Wang, Yiqun Liu
arXiv AI
Aug 12

SKILLER: Language-Level Reinforcement Learning for Reusable Skill Extraction in Small Language Models

arXiv:2608. 10538v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agent skills represent a standardized format for packaging procedural knowledge and domain expertise, serving within agent harness systems as an essential mechanism to continually constrain a language model's behavior space for repeatable, high-quality task execution.

By Chenhao Dang, Siyuan Xiong, Conghui He, Weijia Li