arXiv AI

Agent Skills for Large Language Models: Architecture, Acquisition, Security, and the Path Forward

arXiv:2602. 12430v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The transition from monolithic language models to modular, skill-equipped agents marks a defining shift in how large language models (LLMs) are deployed in practice.

arXiv AI
Sep 25

Progressive Skill Discovery as Access Control for Tool-Using LLM Agents: Structural Governance through Role-Scoped Capability Delivery

The paper introduces skilder, a framework that organizes LLM agent capabilities into role‑scoped bundles of skills, tools, and instructions, with explicit limits. Agents start with a minimal role catalog, discover the roles needed for a task, and receive the associated tools only through a single MCP server, ensuring deterministic enforcement of scope. Experiments on 13 tasks with six models show that skilder’s authorization layer prevents unauthorized tool calls and parameter violations while maintaining flexibility through dynamic cross‑role capability acquisition.

By Michael Stettler, Benjamin Girardet, Jonas Canton, Nicolas Corod
arXiv AI
Sep 10

AgentLeak: Cloning Stronger LLM Agent Capabilities onto Weaker Agents Beyond Skill Stealing

The paper introduces AgentLeak, a black‑box attack that clones the task‑solving capabilities of a strong LLM agent onto a weaker one by exploiting differences between successful and failed executions. Unlike prior skill‑stealing methods that only recover explicit skill artifacts, AgentLeak identifies and incorporates missing procedural behaviors, boosting task pass rates by over 40% and closing more than 80% of the capability gap across 20 scenarios. The study demonstrates that observable execution behavior can leak proprietary procedural knowledge, posing a confidentiality risk for LLM agents.

By Xiaoting Lyu, Yuhong Wu, Yufei Han, Shichang Liu, Liang Zhang, Bin Wang, Bin Wang, Xiaobo Ma, Wei Wang
arXiv AI
Aug 24

ClawSentry: A Progressive Multi-Tier Security Monitor for Safeguarding Autonomous LLM Agents

ClawSentry is an open‑source, framework‑agnostic security supervision gateway designed to protect autonomous large language model (LLM) agents from progressive risks that can arise at four points in the agent control loop: skill admission, invocation‑time intent, execution‑time effect, and post‑action consequence. It introduces a multi‑tier decision engine—deterministic L1, rule‑anchored L2, and read‑only L3—alongside a First‑Use Skill Package Review (FSPR) and an Agent Harness Protocol (AHP) that applies a single policy across multiple agent runtimes without modifying their internals. Evaluation on SkillInject and the SkillsSafety benchmark shows that ClawSentry significantly reduces contextual adversarial skill risk (ASR) while maintaining high task success rates (TSR).

By Kai Wang, Zeming Wei, BiaoJie Zeng, Chang Jin, An Wang, Xiaokun Luan, Zhixiao Lin, Jingjing Qu, Xia Hu, Xingcheng Xu
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Aug 11

SKILLER: Language-Level Reinforcement Learning for Reusable Skill Extraction in Small Language Models

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.

arXiv AI
Jun 17

A Framework for Evaluating Agentic Skills at Scale

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
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Aug 18

TRUSS: Towards Task-Reliable and User-Safe Automated Agent Skill Generation

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.