The paper introduces MCRI, a four‑dimensional framework for analyzing and evaluating agent skills, and implements it as MCRI‑Eval, a large‑language‑model‑based evaluation method. Using 63,812 public skills from OpenClaw and 58,275 skill‑conditioned executions across BigCodeBench, BFCL‑Fundamental, and Mind2Web, MCRI‑Eval’s scores correlate with community popularity and outperform other methods in downstream ranking agreement. The evaluation also shows that MCRI‑Eval improves top‑1 skill selection by 17.7, 22.8, and 19.6 percentile points on the three benchmarks, offering a valuable pre‑execution signal for prioritizing promising skills before costly evaluation.
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.
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.
arXiv:2605. 18401v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Long-horizon LLM agents generate traces that could become reusable experience, but raw trajectories are noisy, local, and hard to govern.
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: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: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.
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.
SkillFlow is an open, multi-stage retrieval system that helps AI agents selectively load relevant skills from a large library of community-contributed SKILL.md definitions. The pipeline uses dense retrieval, two rounds of cross-encoder reranking, and LLM-based selection to balance recall and precision. Evaluations on SkillsBench and Terminal-Bench show that SkillFlow improves performance when high-quality skills are available, but retrieval alone does not help if the corpus lacks executable skills for the target domain.
arXiv:2606. 09118v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As LLM capabilities advance rapidly, the evaluation methods used to assess them increasingly lag behind.
The paper presents EvalAgent, an AI assistant that automates agent evaluation by encoding domain expertise into evaluation skills such as procedural instructions, reusable code, and dynamic API retrieval. EvalAgent constructs a trace-based pipeline that outputs metrics, executable code, and reports, and is evaluated using a new meta-evaluation framework and AgentEvalBench. Results show that EvalAgent improves the Eval@1 metric from 17.5% to 65% and receives 79.5% human expert preference, while ablation studies confirm the importance of evaluation skills.
arXiv:2609.27717v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Human-written agent skills encode rich workflows for real-world problem solving, but are typically used as external inference-time instructions rather...
arXiv:2605. 16986v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Additional test-time compute can give LLM agents access to more past experience, yet expanding the context or adding rollouts does not necessarily yield greater agent capability.