Agent Skills Can Be Harmful: An Empirical Study of Skill-Induced Failures in LLM Agents
arXiv:2608. 11888v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agent skills are the de facto mechanism for extending LLM agents with reusable guidance.
Agent skills are the de facto mechanism for extending LLM agents with reusable guidance. A skill can shape the agent's task execution, including planning, tool use, problem-solving, and validation.
arXiv:2608. 11888v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agent skills are the de facto mechanism for extending LLM agents with reusable guidance.
arXiv:2606. 20659v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Agent skills encode reusable procedural knowledge for large language model (LLM) agents, and existing benchmarks show that such skills can improve task-level performance.
TRUSS is a framework that generates and verifies automated agent skills, ensuring they are both functionally effective and safe. It first checks functional claims against evidence and evaluates artifacts against nine safety properties, then tests admitted skills in a controlled environment to capture execution traces and identify failures. The approach achieves perfect precision and recall in vulnerability detection, significantly reduces attack success rates, and boosts task effectiveness and security rates in skill generation benchmarks.
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:2608. 09253v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLM agents are increasingly equipped with skills to perform complex tasks through multi-step reasoning and tool use.
TRUSS is a framework that generates and verifies automated agent skills, ensuring they are both functionally effective and safe. It evaluates candidate skills against source evidence and nine safety properties, then tests them in a controlled environment to capture execution traces and identify failures. The system iteratively refines skills based on these results, achieving high precision in vulnerability detection and significantly improving task performance and security rates.
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:2608.23067v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agent Skills are reusable procedural modules that are increasingly injected into coding-agent sessions to encode framework conventions, anti-patterns,...
Large language model (LLM) agents are increasingly evaluated on their ability to use tools, plan multi-step tasks, coordinate with other agents, and operate over extended horizons. Reported benchmark gains often obscure recurring failure modes documented across otherwise unrelated evaluation efforts.
arXiv:2608. 08570v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Rejection sampling fine-tuning (RFT) is widely used to train code agents by generating trajectories on verifiable software engineering tasks, retaining those that pass the tests, and fine-tuning on the successful rollouts.
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:2607. 05775v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language model (LLM) agents are increasingly evaluated on their ability to use tools, plan multi-step tasks, coordinate with other agents, and operate over extended horizons.