arXiv Machine Learning

An Empirical Study of Agent Skills' Downstream Utility

arXiv AI
Aug 24

Evaluating Skills, Not Just Agents: Agentic Continuous Evaluation of Skills

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
arXiv AI
Sep 28

SkillFlow: Scalable and Efficient Agent Skill Retrieval System

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 AI
Jun 17

A Framework for Evaluating Agentic Skills at Scale

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
arXiv AI
Sep 3

Repo-To-Skill: Distilling GitHub Repositories Into AI4AI Skills

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 AI
Jun 9

Skill Retrieval Augmentation for Agentic AI

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