Break It Down, Pass It On: Cross-Task Skill Transfer in LLM Agents
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:2605. 24050v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Skill libraries allow LLM agents to load task-specific instructions on demand, letting non-expert users solve domain-specific tasks through natural language without knowing which skills exist or how they work.
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.
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. 15390v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLM agents can improve without weight updates by accumulating natural-language skills from experience, but current systems entrust every decision about which skills to keep and how to apply them to LLM judgment alone.
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.
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.
The paper introduces CodeHack, a library of code-based skills with natural-language descriptions designed to improve language agents in complex environments like NetHack. By allowing agents to invoke reusable skills instead of selecting individual actions, the study shows that skill-based agents nearly triple game progression and cut inference cost by 86% in zero‑shot settings, while still retaining the option to fall back on primitive actions. In reinforcement learning, skill-based agents learn faster, achieving a 7.2× larger average gain in dungeon level within the same training budget.
arXiv:2609.15982v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Skills extend an LLM agent beyond its parametric knowledge, and the gain they promise rests on picking the right one. Deployed harnesses route by pre...
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:2608.23067v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agent Skills are reusable procedural modules that are increasingly injected into coding-agent sessions to encode framework conventions, anti-patterns,...
arXiv:2606. 17645v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language model (LLM) web agents are usually deployed as tool callers: each turn, the model reads a fresh page observation and emits one structured tool action.
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. We study this distinction through Progressive Disclosure, where a concise root file points agents to supporting resources on demand, and compare it with a normalized flat baseline.
arXiv:2606. 20659v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Agent skills encode reusable procedural knowledge for large language model (LLM) agents, and existing benchmarks show that such skills can improve task-level performance.