Field-Aware Agent Skill Retrieval explores how keeping the distinct fields of skill documents—such as name, description, and body—separate can improve retrieval performance. By computing sparse and dense similarities for each field independently and combining them with either uniform weights or a small MLP, the authors achieve higher Recall@10 scores on two benchmarks, SkillRet and SRA-Bench. The study shows that the advantage of field-aware representation grows as the skill bank expands, indicating its importance for large-scale lifelong learning agents.
By Paimon Goulart, Liang Wu, Kelly Wan, Evangelos E. Papalexakis, Liangjie Hong
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:2607. 18785v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As large language model agents gain access to increasingly large skill libraries, retrieving the right skill becomes critical to reliable capability selection and execution.
By Jinying Xiao, Bin Ji, Shasha Li, Xiaodong Liu, Ma Jun, Jiacheng Jie, Chao Wang, Nyima Tashi, Jie Yu
arXiv:2605.05726v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: As LLM agents are increasingly deployed with large libraries of reusable skills, selecting the right skill for a user request has become a critical...
By Hongcheol Cho, Ryangkyung Kang, Youngeun Kim
arXiv:2607. 18785v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: As large language model agents gain access to increasingly large skill libraries, retrieving the right skill becomes critical to reliable capability selection and execution.
By Jinying Xiao, Bin Li, Xiaopeng Li, Jianling Li, Jiacheng Jie, Xiaodong Liu, Ma Jun, Chao Wang, Nyima Tashi, Jie Yu
arXiv:2609.08228v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Modern LLM agents increasingly rely on reusable skills, yet as skill libraries scale to thousands of entries, effective retrieval becomes a bottleneck....
By Dawei Fu, Cheng Jiang, Sitian Qian, Huainan Wang, Zhongkai Hao
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:2603. 22455v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Reusable skills let LLM agents package task-specific procedures, tool affordances, and execution guidance into modular building blocks.
By YanZhao Zheng, ZhenTao Zhang, Chao Ma, YuanQiang Yu, JiHuai Zhu, Yong Wu, Tianze Xu, Baohua Dong, Hangcheng Zhu, Ruohui Huang, Gang Yu
arXiv:2607. 26784v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language model agents often encounter related yet distinct tasks that share reusable solution patterns.
By Zhiyuan Yao, Yuxin Chen, Zhengxi Lu, Zishan Xu, Yueqing Sun, Yifu Guo, Yuquan Lu, Zhengzhou Cai, Kangning Zhang, Zhuowen Han, Zi-Han Wang, Ziang Ye, Qi Gu, Xunliang Cai, Weiwen Liu, Yongliang Shen
Large language model agents increasingly rely on reusable skills to extend their capabilities beyond parametric knowl- edge. However, retrieving the appropriate skill from a large- scale library remains challenging because realistic user re- quests are often concise and underspecified, stating only the task goal while leaving the required capabilities and execu- tion steps implicit.
arXiv:2606. 03056v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As LLM agents adopt large skill libraries, selecting the right subset becomes a structural problem rather than a similarity-matching one: skills depend on, conflict with, specialize, or duplicate one another, a structure invisible to both full enumeration and embedding similarity.
By Tong Bai, Zhenglin Wan, Pengfei Zhou, Xingrui Yu, Wangbo Zhao, Yang You, Ivor W. Tsang
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