Agent Skills package procedural guidance and resources for reuse, but a relevant Skill does not necessarily improve task performance. Existing studies characterize Skill content and evaluate downstrea...
arXiv:2608.23067v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Agent Skills are reusable procedural modules that are increasingly injected into coding-agent sessions to encode framework conventions, anti-patterns,...
By Ziyue Yang, Fan Ding
arXiv:2608. 11888v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agent skills are the de facto mechanism for extending LLM agents with reusable guidance.
By Gen Dong, Yanjie Gao, Liqun Li, Tianyin Xu, Yu Hua, Fan Yang
Agent skills are the de facto mechanism for extending LLM agents with reusable guidance. A skill can shape the agent's task execution, including planning, tool use, problem-solving, and validation.
The paper introduces ACES (Agentic Continuous Evaluation of Skills), a framework that evaluates reusable skills and capability packages by running paired live trials with and without a target skill, normalizing results into the Agent Trajectory Interchange Format (ATIF), and grading six runtime metrics to compute Skill Lift. ACES demonstrates that scan-only gates miss important aspects of skill performance, while the evaluation protocol reveals significant improvements in skill execution, behavior check, and skill efficiency across 145 real skills and 947 scored cases. The open‑source NVIDIA SkillEvaluator implementation enables reproducible, repository‑native assessment of agentic skills in production environments.
By Christopher Kevin, Narendran Raghavan, Jean-Francois Puget, Roshni Malani, Meghana Puvvadi, Moshe Abramovitch, Mohit Gupta, Rama Akkiraju, Subodh Prabhu, Yogesh Dangi, Wei Luo, Seong Hee Lee
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.
By Fangzhou Li, Pagkratios Tagkopoulos, Ilias Tagkopoulos
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.
By Hongyi Liu, Haoyan Yang, Tao Jiang, Bo Tang, Feiyu Xiong, Yuyu Luo, Zhiyu Li
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
The paper introduces Repo-To-Skill, a method for converting GitHub repositories into reusable AI skills. By distilling operational knowledge from over 1,000 machine‑learning repositories, the authors build the AREX‑Skill Library with more than 5,000 verified skills across 20 areas. Integrating these skills into a research agent—DisCo—yields significant performance boosts on multiple benchmarks, demonstrating the value of reusable, task‑agnostic knowledge.
By Jianlyu Chen, Yuyang Hu, Hongjin Qian, Jiawei Liu, Wenqing Wei, Xiaolong Chen, Defu Lian, Zhicheng Dou, Chaozhuo Li, Qiwei Ye, Zheng Liu
arXiv:2609.38822v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Anthropic's Agent Skills package reusable procedural know-how for an LLM agent into SKILL.md directories, and open-source aggregations have grown pas...
By Guanqun Yang, Wenlong Zhang, Tian Shi, Ping Wang
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.
By Weihang Su, Jianming Long, Qingyao Ai, Qiaozhi He, Yichen Tang, Changyue Wang, Yiteng Tu, Yingbo Wang, Yiqun Liu
arXiv:2606. 11543v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agent Skills augment large language model (LLM) agents with procedural knowledge at inference time, but current benchmarks rarely distinguish what a Skill says from how it is organized.
By Zhiyu Chen, Zihan Guo, Bo Huang, Bingwei Lu, Jianghao Lin, Yuanjian Zhou, Weinan Zhang