arXiv Machine Learning

KV-Skill: Forging Expertise in the Model's Native Language

arXiv:2608. 05475v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Task knowledge is commonly stored either as text in the prompt or as an update to model weights.

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
Aug 12

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

arXiv:2608. 10538v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: 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.

By Chenhao Dang, Siyuan Xiong, Conghui He, Weijia Li
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 29

New LoRA Skills Should Read but Never Write

The paper introduces READ, a method for composing low‑rank adapters (LoRA) in large language models. By rewriting each adapter into a balanced canonical form and enforcing a one‑directional coupling, READ allows new skills to read but never write into the output subspaces of existing skills, eliminating interference. Experiments on four benchmark suites and two model families show that READ consistently outperforms existing baselines, improving SuperGLUE scores by over twenty points and domain suite scores by more than seven points.

By Zeyan Li, Panqi Yang, Qirong Guo, Shengda Zhuo, SIyuan Qiu, Hu Xu, Chun Li, Jianfeng Xu
arXiv AI
Aug 24

Representation Affects Retrieval: A Case Study of Skill Discovery and Routing in a Multimodal Agent Harness

The paper examines how skill representations influence selection in a multimodal video agent harness called Tinycloud. It compares two types of skill representations—tool-skills and workflow-skills—and two prompt surfaces—full inlined bodies and one-line listings—across three exposure regimes. The study finds that full autoload exposure consistently selects the correct skill, while partial exposure can cause lexical competition that misroutes tasks, highlighting that in-prompt exposure is not always beneficial.

By Kevin Dela Rosa
arXiv AI
Jun 16

SkillsBench: Benchmarking How Well Agent Skills Work Across Diverse Tasks

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
arXiv AI
3d ago

D-Skill: Distilling Teacher Knowledge through Agent Skills

D‑Skill is a framework that distills the behavioral advantage of a large language‑model teacher into an interpretable natural‑language skill document, using only paired rollouts and no weight updates. The skill is constructed offline from fixed trajectories, then provided to a smaller student model at inference time. Across benchmarks such as SpreadsheetBench‑Verified, ALFWorld, and chess puzzles, D‑Skill closes 75‑95% of the teacher‑student performance gap and reduces inference cost by 5.7×–8.3× compared to the teacher.

By Shuo Yuan, Dacheng Li, Joseph E. Gonzalez