Skill-to-LoRA: From Using Skills to Learning Behaviors for Token-Efficient LLM Agents
arXiv:2606. 16769v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agent skills are commonly distributed as SKILL.
arXiv:2606. 06087v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Agent systems increasingly use textual skills to encode reusable task procedures, but injecting these skills into the prompt at every step incurs substantial context overhead and exposes skill content as plaintext.
arXiv:2606. 16769v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agent skills are commonly distributed as SKILL.
SkillFM is a generative framework that creates task‑conditioned textual skills for large language model agents without relying on manual skill banks or reinforcement learning. It encodes skills into a continuous latent space using a codec and trains a conditional flow model with improved MeanFlow, allowing single‑step latent sampling at inference. The sampled latent is decoded by an LLM into textual guidance, and the method outperforms other vector‑based skill approaches on ALFWorld, Search‑QA, and other tasks.
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.
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.
Since intelligence fundamentally relies on efficient skill acquisition (Chollet, 2019), the ability to leverage skills is critical. For LLMs, skills, manually authored or extracted from task trajectories, are textual recipes encoding mature problem-solving experience and are critical to agentic capabilities.
SkillGym is an automatic pipeline that generates verifiable environments for training skill-use agents. It crawls internet skills, filters for reproducible workflows, and uses a builder‑reviewer process to create difficulty‑controlled tasks with reference solutions and verifiers. The system builds 6.8k environments, collects 19k successful trajectories, and fine‑tunes LLMs from 2B to 122B parameters, improving performance and skill invocation rates.
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.
arXiv:2608. 20274v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language model (LLM) agents can induce skills from completed tasks and reuse them later to grow more capable with experience.
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:2603. 22455v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Reusable skills let LLM agents package task-specific procedures, tool affordances, and execution guidance into modular building blocks.
arXiv:2607. 25853v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Skills have become an important abstraction for enabling large language model (LLM) agents to reuse past experience in long-horizon interactive tasks.
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.