arXiv:2608. 05604v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) increasingly act as agents whose procedural knowledge is stored in reusable skill packages and loaded at inference time.
By Xingyu Tan, Xiaoyang Wang, Qing Liu, Xiwei Xu, Xin Yuan, Liming Zhu, Wenjie Zhang
SkillGLoW introduces a new way for large language model agents to self‑improve by consolidating procedural skills shared across related tasks. Instead of storing all skills in a single global document or a flat per‑task pool, SkillGLoW aggregates local skills into procedural families, compresses them into de‑instantiated global priors, and regenerates instance‑specific details on demand. Experiments on four diverse benchmarks show that these priors improve performance by an average of 17.2 points over a no‑skill baseline, are more compact than per‑task pools, and enable better transfer to unseen tasks.
By Ao Yan, Xin Zhang, Jiawei Du, Joey Tianyi Zhou
arXiv:2608.30785v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Production agent skills are directory bundles, not isolated prompts. The root is loaded at activation; references, schemas, scripts, assets, and nested...
By Xiaofan Bai, Chao Liu, Hongqiang Lin, Di Wu, Mingli Song, Xuan Jin, Xipeng Cao, Yuhong Li
The paper introduces a self‑evolving harness framework where a frozen language‑model agent first solves tasks and then edits its own harness based on run records. Using a 49‑line seed harness, the evolved harness improves average scores on in‑distribution benchmarks by 4.48 points and on out‑of‑distribution benchmarks by 12.64 points, surpassing Codex on the former and matching it on the latter. Continued evolution on a specific out‑of‑distribution benchmark further raises performance, and the study analyzes emergent mechanisms such as output truncation and history compaction.
By Qiankai Xu
arXiv:2607. 05297v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent LLM agents tackle increasingly long-horizon, open-ended tasks, and external skills, reusable procedural knowledge supplied to the agent, further extend this capability.
By Zefeng Wang, Minxi Yan, Jinhe Bi, Sikuan Yan, Volker Tresp, Yunpu Ma
arXiv:2604. 01687v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Anthropic proposes the concept of skills for LLM agents to tackle multi-step professional tasks that simple tool invocations cannot address.
By Hanrong Zhang (Steve), Shicheng Fan (Steve), Henry Peng Zou (Steve), Yankai Chen (Steve), Zhenting Wang (Steve), Jiayu Zhou (Steve), Chengze Li (Steve), Wei-Chieh Huang (Steve), Yifei Yao (Steve), Kening Zheng (Steve), Xue (Steve), Liu, Xiaoxiao Li, Philip S. Yu
arXiv:2606. 09316v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) enables agents to access external knowledge at inference time, but it primarily retrieves fragmented declarative evidence, leaving agents to repeatedly infer task procedures from passages, manuals, examples, logs, or trajectories.
By Qianjun Pan, Yutao Yang, Junsong Li, Jie Zhou, Kai Chen, Xin Li, Qin Chen, Liang He
OS-Marathon is a new benchmark that tests computer‑use agents on vast‑horizon, repetitive tasks, covering 100 tasks across five scenarios and ten domains. The study shows that current state‑of‑the‑art agents perform poorly on these tasks, and that simply decomposing workflows into subtasks does not solve the problem. Introducing a cost‑friendly personalization method called GraphDemo, which adapts agents from a single human demonstration, improves performance, highlighting the value of human guidance for these challenging tasks.
By Jing Wu, Wenjie Ai, Daphne Barretto, Yiye Chen, Qingyu Chen, Yuhang He, Pranit Chawla, Nicholas Gyd\'e, Yanan Jian, Vibhav Vineet
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.
By Yuxuan Liu, Zhaochen Su, Lingyun Xie, Yuhao Zhang, Qing Zong, Jiahe Guo, Zhongwei Xie, Yiyan Ji, Yauwai Yim, Hongyu Luo, Xiyu Ren, Ruan Chenyu, Haoran Li, Yangqiu Song
HarnessEvolve is a self‑evolving framework that improves agent harnesses—prompts, skills, tools, and execution logic—by learning from reference trajectories. It separates execution, evaluation, optimization, and gating into independent modules, addressing credit assignment failure, shortcut learning, and catastrophic forgetting. The approach uses reference trajectories to extract error signals, applies quality and performance gates to candidate updates, and validates updates on held‑out data, consistently outperforming state‑of‑the‑art baselines across diverse benchmarks.
By Wen Jiang, Mingmin Chu, Yimeng Tian, Qianxin Zhang, Haofei Yang, Rui Yang, Yang Liu, Tao Lv, Fangming Li
arXiv:2608. 09168v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agent skills are increasingly used to equip large language model (LLM) agents with reusable procedural knowledge.
By Liang He, Jingbo Wen, Hongyu Gu, Hao Li, Haoyu Wang, Yixiong Chen, Kangning Cui, Xilu Wang
The paper introduces an online skill‑evolution framework that transforms interaction traces and evaluator feedback into a persistent, versioned library of reusable procedures for computer‑use agents. By executing each iteration against a frozen library snapshot, the system updates skills without altering the underlying model parameters. Experiments across four OSWorld domains show that the evolving library consistently outperforms an empty‑library baseline, with gains ranging from 5.7 to 18.6 percentage points, while also revealing domain‑specific temporal stability and challenges in skill retrieval and revision.
By Longtao Hu, Xiao Liang, Linchao Zhu