Since intelligence fundamentally relies on efficient skill acquisition (Chollet, 2019), the ability to leverage skills is critical. For LLMs, skills, manually authored or extracted from task trajectories, are textual recipes encoding mature problem-solving experience and are critical to agentic capabilities.
arXiv:2604. 24594v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: As large language models (LLMs) evolve into agentic problem solvers, they increasingly rely on external, reusable skills to handle tasks beyond their native parametric capabilities.
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.
arXiv:2605. 16986v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Additional test-time compute can give LLM agents access to more past experience, yet expanding the context or adding rollouts does not necessarily yield greater agent capability.
arXiv:2604. 27660v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Many real-world tasks require language models (LMs) to reason over complex contexts that exceed their parametric knowledge.
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.
Large language model agents increasingly rely on reusable skills to extend their capabilities beyond parametric knowl- edge. However, retrieving the appropriate skill from a large- scale library remains challenging because realistic user re- quests are often concise and underspecified, stating only the task goal while leaving the required capabilities and execu- tion steps implicit.
arXiv:2608. 08640v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language model agents increasingly rely on reusable skills to extend their capabilities beyond parametric knowl- edge.
Modern agent frameworks equip large language models with external skill libraries to solve complex tasks. However, it remains unclear whether these systems can effectively evolve their skills and whether the resulting skills improve task-solving capabilities.
arXiv:2608. 03874v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Modern agent frameworks equip large language models with external skill libraries to solve complex tasks.
arXiv:2608. 06880v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: General-purpose skills promise reusable procedural knowledge for language agents, yet semantic relevance does not guarantee execution utility: a retrieved skill may encode assumptions that conflict with the current task, execution environment, or other retrieved skills.
arXiv:2608. 15071v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Learning from experience is critical for developing capable, self-improving large language model (LLM) agents.
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.