Agent skills represent a standardized format for packaging procedural knowledge and domain expertise, serving within agent harness systems as an essential mechanism to continually constrain a language model's behavior space for repeatable, high-quality task execution. However, because strong closed-source models entail high inference costs, current popular agent harnesses, such as Codex and OpenClaw, remain prohibitively expensive when deploying these skills to accomplish real-world tasks.
arXiv:2609.27717v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Human-written agent skills encode rich workflows for real-world problem solving, but are typically used as external inference-time instructions rather...
By Zhilong Ge, Yuting Shao, Yutao Yang, Yuxuan Cai, Jie Zhou, Kai Chen, Bo Zhang, Qin Chen, Liang He
Agent0 is a fully autonomous framework that enables large language model agents to evolve without external data by using a multi‑step co‑evolution process. It pits a curriculum agent against an executor agent, both derived from the same base LLM, where the curriculum agent creates increasingly challenging tasks and the executor learns to solve them. By integrating external tools into the executor’s workflow, the system creates a self‑reinforcing cycle that continuously generates high‑quality curricula, leading to significant gains in reasoning performance—an 18% improvement on mathematical reasoning and 24% on general reasoning for the Qwen3‑8B‑Base model.
By Peng Xia, Kaide Zeng, Jiaqi Liu, Can Qin, Fang Wu, Yiyang Zhou, Caiming Xiong, Huaxiu Yao
The paper introduces the Agentic Compositional Generalization hypothesis, suggesting that reinforcement learning (RL) primarily refines high‑level decision‑making behaviors that orchestrate pre‑trained low‑level skills, rather than teaching new domain‑specific skills from scratch. It proposes River, a training recipe that enhances reward quality by filtering low‑quality synthetic environments and adding process‑level behavior regularization. Using River, RL‑trained agents outperform other open‑source 8B models on four terminal‑agent benchmarks, achieving significant gains with fewer than 30% of the training environments.
By Yihang Yao, Bo Pang, Xuan Phi Nguyen, Ding Zhao, Shafiq Joty, Semih Yavuz
arXiv:2601. 03555v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Training reliable tool-augmented agents remains a significant challenge, largely due to the difficulty of credit assignment in multi-step reasoning.
By Yuxuan Jiang, Francis Ferraro
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