Agent skills are increasingly used to equip large language model (LLM) agents with reusable procedural knowledge. Although recent work has substantially improved skill retrieval due to the increasing skill libraries, retrieving a plausible skill bundle does not guarantee that executing it is worthwhile.
arXiv:2608. 09168v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agent skills are increasingly used to equip large language model (LLM) agents with reusable procedural knowledge.
arXiv:2609.38822v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Anthropic's Agent Skills package reusable procedural know-how for an LLM agent into SKILL.md directories, and open-source aggregations have grown pas...
arXiv:2605.05726v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: As LLM agents are increasingly deployed with large libraries of reusable skills, selecting the right skill for a user request has become a critical...
arXiv:2607. 26784v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language model agents often encounter related yet distinct tasks that share reusable solution patterns.
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.
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.
SkillLift introduces a method for efficiently evolving reusable procedural prompts (skills) in large language model agents by learning a dense rubric that aligns with sparse oracle evaluations. Instead of directly revising skill text based on costly full agent rollouts, the approach decouples skill search from oracle cost through a bilevel optimization framework: an inner loop uses a frozen rubric as a cheap surrogate to guide skill updates, while an outer loop periodically realigns the rubric using a small number of oracle rollouts via rank correlation. Experiments on complex agent task benchmarks demonstrate that SkillLift outperforms existing auto-skill methods while reducing token cost by 40–70% compared to frontier-evolving approaches.
arXiv:2608. 15071v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Learning from experience is critical for developing capable, self-improving large language model (LLM) agents.
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.
Large language model agents often encounter related yet distinct tasks that share reusable solution patterns. Yet standard agentic reinforcement learning treats tasks as independent episodes, while existing approaches to skill learning either focus on repeated attempts of one task or use pipelines with multiple stages that entangle extraction, retrieval, and execution.
arXiv:2603. 22455v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Reusable skills let LLM agents package task-specific procedures, tool affordances, and execution guidance into modular building blocks.
arXiv:2609.08228v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Modern LLM agents increasingly rely on reusable skills, yet as skill libraries scale to thousands of entries, effective retrieval becomes a bottleneck....