arXiv:2607. 00011v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reusable agent skills are emerging as a service-oriented capability layer for Large Language Model (LLM) agents.
By Jingyuan Zheng, Dongjing Wang, Xin Zhang, Hao Chen, Youhuizi Li, Xudong Shen, Haiping Zhang, Butian Huang, Dongjin Yu, Guandong Xu
arXiv:2602. 12670v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Agent Skills are structured packages of procedural knowledge that augment large language model (LLM) agents at inference time.
By Xiangyi Li, Yimin Liu, Wenbo Chen, Bingran You, Zonglin Di, Yifeng He, Shenghan Zheng, Kyoung Whan Choe, Jiankai Sun, Shuyi Wang, Chujun Tao, Binxu Li, Xuandong Zhao, Hejia Geng, Xiaojun Wu, Junwei Zhou, Xiaokun Chen, Hanwen Xing, Yubo Li, Qunhong Zeng, Di Wang, Yuanli Wang, Roey Ben Chaim, Penghao Jiang, Haotian Shen, Luyang Kong, Xinyi Liu, Runhui Wang, Xuanqing Liu, Jiachen Li, Xin Lan, Yueqian Lin, Wengao Ye, Junwei He, Songlin Li, Yue Zhang, Yipeng Gao, Yijiang Li, Ze Ma, Liqiang Jing, Tianyu Wang, Kaixin Li, Yiqi Xue, Haoran Lyu, Yizhuo He, Yuchen Tian, Shutong Wu, Bowei Wang, Yixuan Gao, Bo Chen, Litong Liu, Sikai Cheng, Jiajun Bao, Shuaicheng Tong, Shuwen Xu, Terry Yue Zhuo, Tinghan Ye, Qi Qi, Miao Li, Longtai Liao, Zelin Tan, Chang Shi, Xilin Tang, Srinath Tankasala, Boqin Yuan, Yaoyao Qian, Jianhong Tu, Chenguang Wang, Yizhou Sun, Wei Wang, Aaron Taylor, Ziyue Yang, Changkun Guan, Zhikang Dong, Xinyu Zhang, Steven Dillmann, Han-chung Lee, Dawn Song
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
Toollery is a training‑free framework that compresses candidate lists for large language model agents, enabling efficient selection from thousands of skills and tools. It generates user‑intent queries from each skill or tool specification, builds a retrieval index, and limits online selection to a compact top‑k set before the LLM makes its final decision. Evaluations on the SkillRouter benchmark, BFCL‑V4, and a proprietary smart‑cockpit dataset show that Toollery improves recall and end‑to‑end selection while keeping selection costs bounded.
By Xiangxi Tian, Ran Guan
arXiv:2609.38822v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Anthropic's Agent Skills package reusable procedural know-how for an LLM agent into SKILL.md directories, and open-source aggregations have grown pas...
By Guanqun Yang, Wenlong Zhang, Tian Shi, Ping Wang
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.
By Maksim Shaposhnikov, Nicolas Fortuin, Simon Stipcich, Maria I. Gorinova, Amy Heineike, Rob Willoughby
The paper introduces a structured approach to extracting skill and responsibility level pairs from free text using the Skills Framework for the Information Age (SFIA). It evaluates five methods—including lexical baselines, retrieval‑augmented generation, and multi‑agent crews—against expert‑mapped European ICT role profiles, finding that generative strategies are more precise and that only explicit level‑prediction strategies reliably assign responsibility levels. The study also releases an automated SFIA‑9 corpus and establishes the first reproducible baseline for level‑aware skill extraction.
By Ranuga Disansa, U. S. Samarasinghe, Lasith Gunawardena
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
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
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.
Agent skills are increasingly used to equip large language model (LLM) agents with reusable procedural knowledge. Although recent work has substantially improved skill retrieval due to the increasing skill libraries, retrieving a plausible skill bundle does not guarantee that executing it is worthwhile.
Large language model-based multi-agent systems have recently shown strong potential for complex, long-horizon tasks. However, existing methods mainly rely on coarse prompt-level differentiation without parameter adaptation for diverse subtasks, resulting in insufficient inter-agent heterogeneity and limited specialized capability that bottleneck performance on tasks with complex requirements.