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.
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.
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. 15071v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Learning from experience is critical for developing capable, self-improving large language model (LLM) agents.
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.
arXiv:2606. 06416v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Inference-time skill augmentation provides a lightweight way to improve data-analytic agents by injecting reusable procedural knowledge without updating model parameters.
arXiv:2606. 01139v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agent skills are procedural artifacts that enable LLM agents to execute workflows, verify constraints, and recover from failures.
arXiv:2606. 20363v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Explicit skill libraries make computer-using agents easier to inspect, but it remains unclear whether such libraries can be mined from interaction data in a way that improves downstream policies.
arXiv:2606. 01993v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Abundant procedural knowledge on the Web holds great potential for helping agents solve long-horizon tasks.
arXiv:2604. 01608v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Multi-agent systems (MAS) tackle complex tasks by distributing expertise, though this often comes at the cost of heavy coordination overhead, context fragmentation, and brittle phase ordering.