Demystifying Agent Skills: Why They Work-Until They Don't
arXiv:2608. 14036v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Skills have emerged as a practical and effective approach for enhancing LLM agents at inference time through structured packages of knowledge.
arXiv:2605. 09192v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Agent skills can remarkably improve task success rates by using human-written procedural documents, but their quality is difficult to assess without environment-grounded verification.
arXiv:2608. 14036v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Skills have emerged as a practical and effective approach for enhancing LLM agents at inference time through structured packages of knowledge.
The paper introduces an online skill‑evolution framework that transforms interaction traces and evaluator feedback into a persistent, versioned library of reusable procedures for computer‑use agents. By executing each iteration against a frozen library snapshot, the system updates skills without altering the underlying model parameters. Experiments across four OSWorld domains show that the evolving library consistently outperforms an empty‑library baseline, with gains ranging from 5.7 to 18.6 percentage points, while also revealing domain‑specific temporal stability and challenges in skill retrieval and revision.
arXiv:2609.27717v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Human-written agent skills encode rich workflows for real-world problem solving, but are typically used as external inference-time instructions rather...
LLM agents increasingly execute long-horizon tasks through tool use and environment interaction, shifting evaluation from final-response scoring to verification of complete executions. For skill-augmented agents, verification additionally requires the procedural knowledge encoded in task-time skills, because this knowledge indicates what evidence to inspect and which failures are task-critical.
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.
arXiv:2608. 05573v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLM agents increasingly execute long-horizon tasks through tool use and environment interaction, shifting evaluation from final-response scoring to verification of complete executions.
arXiv:2605. 18401v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Long-horizon LLM agents generate traces that could become reusable experience, but raw trajectories are noisy, local, and hard to govern.
arXiv:2606. 14239v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agent skills are structured procedural packages that guide frozen LLM agents in specialized workflows.
arXiv:2608.30760v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent studies have shown that multimodal large language models (MLLMs) can serve as embodied agents, translating language instructions and visual obse...
arXiv:2608. 15071v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Learning from experience is critical for developing capable, self-improving large language model (LLM) agents.
arXiv:2605.08693v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Skills provide an effective mechanism for improving LLM agents on complex tasks, yet in existing agent frameworks, their creation, refinement, and...
arXiv:2603. 25158v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large Language Model (LLM) agents increasingly rely on domain-specific skills, yet manually authoring such skills does not scale, and skills generated purely from parametric knowledge often miss critical operational pitfalls.