arXiv Computation and Language

Subagents vs Agent Skills: Executing Reusable Knowledge for Long-Horizon Agentic Tasks

arXiv AI
Jul 23

Knowledge-Centric Self-Improvement

arXiv:2607. 19592v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Self-improving AI systems typically treat the agent as the object that improves, by optimizing prompts, workflows, harnesses, or even the agent's own code.

By Xuefei Julie Wang, Lauren Hyoseo Yoon, Chengrui Qu, Amanda Zichang Wang, Atharva Sehgal, Eric Mazumdar, Yisong Yue
arXiv AI
Jun 17

A Framework for Evaluating Agentic Skills at Scale

arXiv:2606. 17819v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Agent skills -- structured, reusable knowledge artifacts that augment LLM agent capabilities -- have been rapidly adopted in industry, yet their cross-domain impact and use across commercial and open-source models remain under-studied, and no reusable methodology exists for evaluating an individual skill.

By Maksim Shaposhnikov, Nicolas Fortuin, Simon Stipcich, Maria I. Gorinova, Amy Heineike, Rob Willoughby
arXiv AI
4d ago

The Hard Part Comes After Search: Benchmarking Web Agents on Synthesizing, Organizing, and Displaying Knowledge

The paper introduces KNOWS, a benchmark for evaluating web agents that act as assistants by retrieving, synthesizing, and presenting information across complex, multi-step browser tasks. It outlines a task design rubric, evaluation protocol combining deterministic checks with LLM judgments, and reports that current agents achieve only modest success, with the best performing agent succeeding on less than 3% of tasks. The study highlights significant gaps in agents’ tool use, visual understanding, and long‑horizon reasoning.

By Alexander Gill, Md Farhan Ishmam, Xuyen Nguyen, Neha Bhat, Parker Henry DeYoung, Fateme Hashemi Chaleshtori, Nathan Stringham, Kenneth Marino, Ana Marasovi\'c
arXiv AI
4d ago

Up and Down the Abstraction Ladder: Code-Based Skills for Language Agents

The paper introduces CodeHack, a library of code-based skills with natural-language descriptions designed to improve language agents in complex environments like NetHack. By allowing agents to invoke reusable skills instead of selecting individual actions, the study shows that skill-based agents nearly triple game progression and cut inference cost by 86% in zero‑shot settings, while still retaining the option to fall back on primitive actions. In reinforcement learning, skill-based agents learn faster, achieving a 7.2× larger average gain in dungeon level within the same training budget.

By Bart{\l}omiej Cupia{\l}, Jens Tuyls, Maciej Wo{\l}czyk, Davide Paglieri, Martin Klissarov, Benjamin Eysenbach, Piotr Mi{\l}o\'s, Karthik R. Narasimhan