arXiv Computation and Language

Learning by Doing: Autonomously Compiling and Curating Agent Skills from Verified Traces

The paper introduces Zep Agent Skills, a production service that autonomously compiles and curates procedural memory for large language model agents by converting verified execution traces into versioned skills. It records each task attempt as a trace, uses a compiler with Reflector and Curator roles to transform verified traces into skills, and applies admission gates and search ranking based on verified outcomes. The open Agent Skills format, originally from Anthropic, allows any host to load compiled skills, and evaluation on several benchmarks shows significant performance gains for weaker executor models without additional training.

arXiv AI
Sep 30

SkillGym: Training Skill-Use Agents with Automatic Verifiable Environment Generation

SkillGym is an automatic pipeline that generates verifiable environments for training skill-use agents. It crawls internet skills, filters for reproducible workflows, and uses a builder‑reviewer process to create difficulty‑controlled tasks with reference solutions and verifiers. The system builds 6.8k environments, collects 19k successful trajectories, and fine‑tunes LLMs from 2B to 122B parameters, improving performance and skill invocation rates.

By Renxi Wang, Mingshan Hee, Fajri Koto, Timothy Baldwin, Haonan Li
arXiv AI
Jun 9

Anything2Skill: Compiling External Knowledge into Reusable Skills for Agents

arXiv:2606. 09316v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) enables agents to access external knowledge at inference time, but it primarily retrieves fragmented declarative evidence, leaving agents to repeatedly infer task procedures from passages, manuals, examples, logs, or trajectories.

By Qianjun Pan, Yutao Yang, Junsong Li, Jie Zhou, Kai Chen, Xin Li, Qin Chen, Liang He
arXiv AI
Sep 28

SkillFlow: Scalable and Efficient Agent Skill Retrieval System

SkillFlow is an open, multi-stage retrieval system that helps AI agents selectively load relevant skills from a large library of community-contributed SKILL.md definitions. The pipeline uses dense retrieval, two rounds of cross-encoder reranking, and LLM-based selection to balance recall and precision. Evaluations on SkillsBench and Terminal-Bench show that SkillFlow improves performance when high-quality skills are available, but retrieval alone does not help if the corpus lacks executable skills for the target domain.

By Fangzhou Li, Pagkratios Tagkopoulos, Ilias Tagkopoulos
arXiv AI
Sep 3

Repo-To-Skill: Distilling GitHub Repositories Into AI4AI Skills

The paper introduces Repo-To-Skill, a method for converting GitHub repositories into reusable AI skills. By distilling operational knowledge from over 1,000 machine‑learning repositories, the authors build the AREX‑Skill Library with more than 5,000 verified skills across 20 areas. Integrating these skills into a research agent—DisCo—yields significant performance boosts on multiple benchmarks, demonstrating the value of reusable, task‑agnostic knowledge.

By Jianlyu Chen, Yuyang Hu, Hongjin Qian, Jiawei Liu, Wenqing Wei, Xiaolong Chen, Defu Lian, Zhicheng Dou, Chaozhuo Li, Qiwei Ye, Zheng Liu
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jun 10

SkillJuror: Measuring How Agent Skill Organization Changes Runtime Behavior

Agent Skills augment large language model (LLM) agents with procedural knowledge at inference time, but current benchmarks rarely distinguish what a Skill says from how it is organized. We study this distinction through Progressive Disclosure, where a concise root file points agents to supporting resources on demand, and compare it with a normalized flat baseline.

arXiv AI
Aug 25

TRACE: A Self-Evolving Skill Bank for Consistent, Limit-Aware LLM Agents

TRACE (TRAjectory-Contrastive Evolution) is a self‑evolving skill bank that improves the consistency and limit‑awareness of large‑language‑model agents without changing the model weights. By iteratively refining modular skills based on successful and failed trajectories, TRACE raises consistent performance (Pass^3) on the CAR‑bench in‑car assistant tasks from 59.9 % to 94.5 % on GPT‑5.5 and achieves first place on the hidden set with GPT‑5.6‑Sol. The approach demonstrates that a skill‑based, self‑evolution loop can convert a model’s potential into stable, reliable behavior.

By Wenhao Wu, Menghao Zhang, Xin Wang, Zhi Wang, Kun Shao, Jian Luan
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Sep 2

Repo-To-Skill: Distilling GitHub Repositories Into AI4AI Skills

Repo-To-Skill: Distilling GitHub Repositories Into AI4AI Skills introduces DisCo, a research agent that extracts and verifies operational knowledge from GitHub repositories to create reusable AI skills. The agent produces both task‑agnostic skills—compiled into the AREX‑Skill Library of over 5,000 verified skills from 1,000 repositories—and task‑oriented skills tailored to specific research tasks. When equipped with these skills, the agent achieves significant performance gains across multiple benchmarks, outperforming a skill‑free version by 134.3% on MLE‑bench, 34.4% on PaperBench, 9.2% on FrontierCS, and 14.0% on PassNet.