Reusable skills let LLM agents load task-specific instructions on demand, but they make execution depend on implicit routing over skill metadata. We test whether this design scales by holding SkillsBe...
arXiv:2605. 24050v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Skill libraries allow LLM agents to load task-specific instructions on demand, letting non-expert users solve domain-specific tasks through natural language without knowing which skills exist or how they work.
By Hongwen Song, Song Wei
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.
By YanZhao Zheng, ZhenTao Zhang, Chao Ma, YuanQiang Yu, JiHuai Zhu, Yong Wu, Tianze Xu, Baohua Dong, Hangcheng Zhu, Ruohui Huang, Gang Yu
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.
By Fangzhou Li, Pagkratios Tagkopoulos, Ilias Tagkopoulos
SkillLens introduces a hierarchical skill-evolution framework that organizes skills into a four-layer graph of policies, strategies, procedures, and primitives, allowing retrieval at mixed granularity. The system first retrieves semantically relevant skill seeds, expands them via a degree‑corrected random walk, and uses a verifier to decide whether to accept, decompose, rewrite, or skip each visited unit. This approach enables agents to reuse compatible subskills while locally adapting mismatched components, and theoretical analysis shows sublinear cost under sparse mismatch assumptions, with empirical results on MuLocbench and ALFWorld demonstrating consistent improvements over strong baselines.
By Ziyang Yu, Yongliang Miao, Liang Zhao, Bowen Zhu, Hasibul Haque
SkillBrowser is a Meta‑Skill‑managed framework that allows large language model agents to identify their current capability needs, formulate targeted queries, and selectively load skills on demand. By providing relevant procedural content only when needed, it reduces context pollution and misaligned skill exposure that can disrupt reasoning. Experiments on six SRA‑Bench subsets and five LLMs show that SkillBrowser improves aggregate accuracy over static retrieval and LLM‑based selection, especially for multi‑step tool use, while mitigating accuracy degradation on already‑solvable instances.
By Jin Ye, Yifan Jiang, Lan-zhe Guo
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.
By Weihang Su, Jianming Long, Qingyao Ai, Qiaozhi He, Yichen Tang, Changyue Wang, Yiteng Tu, Yingbo Wang, Yiqun Liu
arXiv:2609.15982v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Skills extend an LLM agent beyond its parametric knowledge, and the gain they promise rests on picking the right one. Deployed harnesses route by pre...
By Ruishuo Chen, Xun Wang, Yu Chen, Zhuoran Li, Longbo Huang
arXiv:2606. 11543v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agent Skills augment large language model (LLM) agents with procedural knowledge at inference time, but current benchmarks rarely distinguish what a Skill says from how it is organized.
By Zhiyu Chen, Zihan Guo, Bo Huang, Bingwei Lu, Jianghao Lin, Yuanjian Zhou, Weinan Zhang
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.
By Zhiyuan Jiang, Fangrui Huang, Hanwen Xing, Xander Wu, Yipeng Gao, Rui Cao, Mengdi Wang, Shilong Liu, Yijiang Li
Agent Skills augment large language model (LLM) agents with procedural knowledge at inference time, but current benchmarks rarely distinguish what a Skill says from how it is organized. We study this distinction through Progressive Disclosure, where a concise root file points agents to supporting resources on demand, and compare it with a normalized flat baseline.
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.
By Qinfeng Li, Dalin He, Yuntai Bao, Ying Yang, Ruoxi Chen, Xinyan Yu, Lizhou Liang, Ge Su, Wenqi Zhang, Xuhong Zhang