The paper introduces ACES (Agentic Continuous Evaluation of Skills), a framework that evaluates reusable skills and capability packages by running paired live trials with and without a target skill, normalizing results into the Agent Trajectory Interchange Format (ATIF), and grading six runtime metrics to compute Skill Lift. ACES demonstrates that scan-only gates miss important aspects of skill performance, while the evaluation protocol reveals significant improvements in skill execution, behavior check, and skill efficiency across 145 real skills and 947 scored cases. The open‑source NVIDIA SkillEvaluator implementation enables reproducible, repository‑native assessment of agentic skills in production environments.
By Christopher Kevin, Narendran Raghavan, Jean-Francois Puget, Roshni Malani, Meghana Puvvadi, Moshe Abramovitch, Mohit Gupta, Rama Akkiraju, Subodh Prabhu, Yogesh Dangi, Wei Luo, Seong Hee Lee
arXiv:2605. 22949v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Foundation-model pools are increasingly used as black-box responders in coordinated systems where a coordinator must decide which response to trust.
By Joss Armstrong
arXiv:2607. 16345v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Modern agentic systems increasingly rely on skills: installable packages of natural language and code that teach an LLM agent to perform a domain task.
By Tejas Singh Anand, Yuet Ying Christina Wang, Wanting Jiang, Steve Masson, Tian Zheng, Bingjie Zhou
arXiv:2606. 14239v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agent skills are structured procedural packages that guide frozen LLM agents in specialized workflows.
By Haowen Gao, Haoran Chen, Can Wang, Shasha Guo, Liang Pang, Zhaoyang Liu, Huawei Shen, Xueqi Cheng
arXiv:2608. 11727v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: When a coding agent obeys a rule, it may simply have been going to do that anyway.
By Zining Huang, Haoran Que, Hong Zeng, Ge Zhang, Zuo Wang, Jin Chen, Haodong Wang, Zhongfei Hou, Changxin Pu, Shen Yan, Wenhao Huang
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:2607. 25398v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Language-model agents are increasingly deployed under standing instructions: a system prompt, a policy file, or a skills document is placed in context, and the agent is trusted to let it govern every action that follows.
By Liudas Panavas, Sebastian Minus, Bradley Monton, Derek Ray, Suhaas Garre, Sushant Mehta, Edwin Chen
Skill‑V is a verifiable self‑evolving skill library for interactive agents that represents skills as versioned, falsifiable contracts linking semantic intent to observable behavior. The system uses task failures to add new skills and contract‑outcome disagreements to revise existing skill boundaries, ensuring revisions preserve semantic constraints and pass non‑regression tests on historical evidence. An applicability‑aware filter excludes confidently inapplicable skill candidates, leading to high success rates on ALFWorld (95.3%) and WebShop (85.9%) while keeping the library more compact than growth‑only baselines.
By Jie Ma, Zhipeng Qian, Yufei Ma, Zihan Liang, Jiayi Ji, Qingpeng Cai, Ben Chen, Peng Jiang, Xiaoshuai Sun
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.
By Zhibo Zhang, Zhen Ouyang, Ling Shi, Kailong Wang
arXiv:2603. 00077v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Rubric-based LLM judges have become indispensable for evaluating and optimizing systems on non-verifiable tasks, where success cannot be reduced to exact programmatic checks.
By Delip Rao, Chris Callison-Burch
arXiv:2606. 29654v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multi-agent deliberation among LLMs can improve reasoning, but deployment requires deciding when the current answer is reliable enough to act on and when it should be escalated to human review.
By Mengdie Flora Wang, Haochen Xie, Guanghui Wang, Devin Zhang, Jae Oh Woo
The paper argues that evaluating agents as fixed models is insufficient, proposing instead to treat them as configurable systems. Using a new benchmark of four scientific tasks, the authors analyze how five configuration aspects—task information, reasoning, self‑verification, time budget, and backbone model—affect performance, noting that about 54% of outcome variance arises from run‑to‑run differences even with the same settings. The study finds that providing more task information has the strongest impact, while interactions among settings (e.g., extra time only helps with adequate information or model capability) and the choice of verification tools significantly shape agent behavior.
By Luis Wiedmann, Leander Girrbach, Cordelia Schmid, Zeynep Akata