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: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: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:2608. 16045v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLM-based data-analysis tools are increasingly used to help users analyze messy spreadsheets and workbooks, from answering questions over uploaded files to generating code, summaries, and visualizations.
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: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.
Autonomous scientific research agents are increasingly applied to end-to-end scientific workflows, including literature review, data analysis, experimentation, and report generation. However, open-end...
arXiv:2607. 07504v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Product data scientists often ask LLM-based agents to help with recurring execution tasks such as cleaning data, writing SQL, choosing statistical tests, and formatting results.
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:2608. 06891v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agent skills provide reusable procedural knowledge that helps agents solve specialized tasks.
arXiv:2607. 01874v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Skills are becoming a reusable operational layer for LLM agents, encoding SOPs, domain rules, tool workflows, scripts, and validation routines.
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. 14239v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agent skills are structured procedural packages that guide frozen LLM agents in specialized workflows.
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.