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
arXiv:2608. 10538v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: 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.
By Chenhao Dang, Siyuan Xiong, Conghui He, Weijia Li
arXiv:2605. 03195v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Modern coding agents increasingly delegate specialized subtasks to subagents, which are smaller, focused agentic loops that handle narrow responsibilities like search, debugging or terminal execution.
By Spandan Garg, Vikram Nitin, Yufan Huang
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.
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.
By Bart{\l}omiej Cupia{\l}, Jens Tuyls, Maciej Wo{\l}czyk, Davide Paglieri, Martin Klissarov, Benjamin Eysenbach, Piotr Mi{\l}o\'s, Karthik R. Narasimhan
arXiv:2604. 27660v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Many real-world tasks require language models (LMs) to reason over complex contexts that exceed their parametric knowledge.
By Shuzheng Si, Haozhe Zhao, Yu Lei, Qingyi Wang, Dingwei Chen, Zhitong Wang, Zhenhailong Wang, Kangyang Luo, Zheng Wang, Gang Chen, Fanchao Qi, Minjia Zhang, Maosong Sun