Payload-preserving SkillCloak evasions defeat install-time skill scanners at ≥90% with SFS packing, while runtime SkillDetonate detects ~97% of attacks via sandbox taint evidence.
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SkillsBench: Benchmarking How Well Agent Skills Work Across Diverse Tasks
Canonical reference. 76% of citing Pith papers cite this work as background.
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abstract
Agent Skills are structured packages of procedural knowledge that augment LLM agents at inference time. Despite rapid adoption, there is no standard way to measure whether they actually help. We present SkillsBench, a benchmark of 86 tasks across 11 domains paired with curated Skills and deterministic verifiers. Each task is evaluated under three conditions: no Skills, curated Skills, and self-generated Skills. We test 7 agent-model configurations over 7,308 trajectories. Curated Skills raise average pass rate by 16.2 percentage points(pp), but effects vary widely by domain (+4.5pp for Software Engineering to +51.9pp for Healthcare) and 16 of 84 tasks show negative deltas. Self-generated Skills provide no benefit on average, showing that models cannot reliably author the procedural knowledge they benefit from consuming. Focused Skills with 2--3 modules outperform comprehensive documentation, and smaller models with Skills can match larger models without them.
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- abstract Agent Skills are structured packages of procedural knowledge that augment LLM agents at inference time. Despite rapid adoption, there is no standard way to measure whether they actually help. We present SkillsBench, a benchmark of 86 tasks across 11 domains paired with curated Skills and deterministic verifiers. Each task is evaluated under three conditions: no Skills, curated Skills, and self-generated Skills. We test 7 agent-model configurations over 7,308 trajectories. Curated Skills raise average pass rate by 16.2 percentage points(pp), but effects vary widely by domain (+4.5pp for Softwar
co-cited works
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2026 101representative citing papers
SkillFuzz is an execution-free fuzzing method that extracts skill contracts and applies contract-guided MCTS to discover over 1000 implicit intents in LLM skill marketplaces.
SkillComposer performs task-conditioned skill sequence prediction with a constrained autoregressive decoder to jointly output skill subset, count, and order, raising pass rates by 23.1 and 18.2 percentage points on two production coding agents over no-skill baselines.
EnterpriseClawBench is a benchmark for enterprise agents constructed from proprietary real-world sessions, with the reusable contribution being the construction and evaluation protocol rather than the data itself.
SkillAudit is an automated framework that generates capability-aligned tasks from skill packages, executes them in sandboxes, and produces reports on utility, cost, and safety via baseline comparisons and two-stage risk detection.
Framework estimates context-dependent marginal utility of candidate skills via reward gaps in matched base vs. skill-augmented rollouts to filter skills and co-train policy as generator.
AIP models skills as graphs of discrete steps connected by typed I/O edges under a validated schema, raising agent mean reward from 0.60 to 0.71 and pass rate from 53% to 67% on 27 SkillsBench tasks while enabling node-level fixes.
SkillHarm benchmark shows current AI agents are vulnerable to lifecycle-aware skill poisoning with success rates up to 86.3% for fixed-payload attacks and 69.3% for self-mutating attacks.
VitaBench 2.0 introduces a benchmark for long-term personalized and proactive agent behavior, with results indicating substantial gaps in current frontier LLMs.
SkillEvolBench is a new diagnostic benchmark that evaluates the transition from episodic experience to procedural skills in LLM agents using role-conditioned task families and frozen deployment tests.
ContractBench shows that LLM agents frequently violate observation contracts by using expired artifacts or corrupting their byte integrity, with no model exceeding 80% success and notable scaling irregularities across families.
SkillOps maintains LLM skill libraries via Skill Contracts and ecosystem graphs, raising ALFWorld task success to 79.5% as a standalone agent and improving retrieval baselines by up to 2.9 points with near-zero library-time LLM cost.
BenchJack audits 10 AI agent benchmarks, synthesizes exploits achieving near-perfect scores without task completion, surfaces 219 flaws, and reduces hackable-task ratios to under 10% on four benchmarks via iterative patching.
SkillSafetyBench is a benchmark of 155 cases across 47 tasks and 6 risk domains showing that non-user attacks via skills, artifacts, or environments can consistently induce unsafe agent behavior.
Counterfactual Trace Auditing detects 522 behavioral change patterns from skills on 49 tasks where pass rates shift only 0.3 points on average.
SkillSmith is a boundary-first compiler-runtime system that turns skill packages into minimal executable interfaces, cutting token usage 57%, thinking iterations 43%, and solve time 51% versus raw skill injection on SkillsBench.
SkillGuard extracts executable environment contracts from LLM skill documents to detect only relevant drifts, reporting zero false positives on 599 cases, 100% precision in known-drift tests, and raising one-round repair success from 10% to 78%.
CMIB uses a conditional multimodal information bottleneck to create reusable agent skills that separate verbalizable text content from predictive perceptual residuals, improving execution stability.
SkillRet benchmark shows fine-tuned retrievers improve NDCG@10 by 13+ points over prior models on large-scale skill retrieval for LLM agents.
SkillCom decomposes LLM semantic communication into four skills connected by structured semantic-unit interfaces and outperforms monolithic LLM baselines in robustness on multi-hop QA and dialogue state tracking tasks.
TCOD stabilizes on-policy distillation for multi-turn agents via temporal curriculum on trajectory depth, improving performance up to 18 points over vanilla OPD and sometimes surpassing the teacher.
COSPLAY co-evolves an LLM decision agent with a skill bank agent to improve long-horizon game performance, reporting over 25.1% average reward gains versus frontier LLM baselines on single-player benchmarks.
SkillFlow benchmark shows lifelong skill evolution yields modest gains for some models like Claude Opus 4.6 but limited or negative utility for others despite high skill usage.
In a simulated economy of 25 LLM agents, a programmable market testbed shows that market rules and agent configuration reshape trade, quality, and wealth, with transparency and honesty norms backfiring.
citing papers explorer
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Cloak and Detonate: Scanner Evasion and Dynamic Detection of Agent Skill Malware
Payload-preserving SkillCloak evasions defeat install-time skill scanners at ≥90% with SFS packing, while runtime SkillDetonate detects ~97% of attacks via sandbox taint evidence.
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SkillFuzz: Fuzzing Skill Composition for Implicit Intents Discovery in Open Skill Marketplaces
SkillFuzz is an execution-free fuzzing method that extracts skill contracts and applies contract-guided MCTS to discover over 1000 implicit intents in LLM skill marketplaces.
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Generative Skill Composition for LLM Agents
SkillComposer performs task-conditioned skill sequence prediction with a constrained autoregressive decoder to jointly output skill subset, count, and order, raising pass rates by 23.1 and 18.2 percentage points on two production coding agents over no-skill baselines.
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EnterpriseClawBench: Benchmarking Agents from Real Workplace Sessions
EnterpriseClawBench is a benchmark for enterprise agents constructed from proprietary real-world sessions, with the reusable contribution being the construction and evaluation protocol rather than the data itself.
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SkillAudit: From Fixed-Suite Benchmarking to Skill-Centered Assessment
SkillAudit is an automated framework that generates capability-aligned tasks from skill packages, executes them in sandboxes, and produces reports on utility, cost, and safety via baseline comparisons and two-stage risk detection.
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Co-Evolving Skill Generation and Policy Optimization
Framework estimates context-dependent marginal utility of candidate skills via reward gaps in matched base vs. skill-augmented rollouts to filter skills and co-train policy as generator.
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AIP: A Graph Representation for Learning and Governing Agent Skills
AIP models skills as graphs of discrete steps connected by typed I/O edges under a validated schema, raising agent mean reward from 0.60 to 0.71 and pass rate from 53% to 67% on 27 SkillsBench tasks while enabling node-level fixes.
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SkillHarm: Lifecycle-Aware Skill-Based Attacks via Automated Construction
SkillHarm benchmark shows current AI agents are vulnerable to lifecycle-aware skill poisoning with success rates up to 86.3% for fixed-payload attacks and 69.3% for self-mutating attacks.
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VitaBench 2.0: Evaluating Personalized and Proactive Agents in Long-Term User Interactions
VitaBench 2.0 introduces a benchmark for long-term personalized and proactive agent behavior, with results indicating substantial gaps in current frontier LLMs.
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SkillEvolBench: Benchmarking the Evolution from Episodic Experience to Procedural Skills
SkillEvolBench is a new diagnostic benchmark that evaluates the transition from episodic experience to procedural skills in LLM agents using role-conditioned task families and frozen deployment tests.
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ContractBench: Can LLM Agents Preserve Observation Contracts?
ContractBench shows that LLM agents frequently violate observation contracts by using expired artifacts or corrupting their byte integrity, with no model exceeding 80% success and notable scaling irregularities across families.
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SkillOps: Managing LLM Agent Skill Libraries as Self-Maintaining Software Ecosystems
SkillOps maintains LLM skill libraries via Skill Contracts and ecosystem graphs, raising ALFWorld task success to 79.5% as a standalone agent and improving retrieval baselines by up to 2.9 points with near-zero library-time LLM cost.
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Do Androids Dream of Breaking the Game? Systematically Auditing AI Agent Benchmarks with BenchJack
BenchJack audits 10 AI agent benchmarks, synthesizes exploits achieving near-perfect scores without task completion, surfaces 219 flaws, and reduces hackable-task ratios to under 10% on four benchmarks via iterative patching.
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SkillSafetyBench: Evaluating Agent Safety under Skill-Facing Attack Surfaces
SkillSafetyBench is a benchmark of 155 cases across 47 tasks and 6 risk domains showing that non-user attacks via skills, artifacts, or environments can consistently induce unsafe agent behavior.
-
Counterfactual Trace Auditing of LLM Agent Skills
Counterfactual Trace Auditing detects 522 behavioral change patterns from skills on 49 tasks where pass rates shift only 0.3 points on average.
-
SkillSmith: Compiling Agent Skills into Boundary-Guided Runtime Interfaces
SkillSmith is a boundary-first compiler-runtime system that turns skill packages into minimal executable interfaces, cutting token usage 57%, thinking iterations 43%, and solve time 51% versus raw skill injection on SkillsBench.
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Skill Drift Is Contract Violation: Proactive Maintenance for LLM Agent Skill Libraries
SkillGuard extracts executable environment contracts from LLM skill documents to detect only relevant drifts, reporting zero false positives on 599 cases, 100% precision in known-drift tests, and raising one-round repair success from 10% to 78%.
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Skill-CMIB: Multimodal Agent Skill for Consistent Action via Conditional Multimodal Information Bottleneck
CMIB uses a conditional multimodal information bottleneck to create reusable agent skills that separate verbalizable text content from predictive perceptual residuals, improving execution stability.
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SkillRet: A Large-Scale Benchmark for Skill Retrieval in LLM Agents
SkillRet benchmark shows fine-tuned retrievers improve NDCG@10 by 13+ points over prior models on large-scale skill retrieval for LLM agents.
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SkillCom: Decomposing LLM-based Semantic Communication into Task and Channel Aware Skills
SkillCom decomposes LLM semantic communication into four skills connected by structured semantic-unit interfaces and outperforms monolithic LLM baselines in robustness on multi-hop QA and dialogue state tracking tasks.
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TCOD: Exploring Temporal Curriculum in On-Policy Distillation for Multi-turn Autonomous Agents
TCOD stabilizes on-policy distillation for multi-turn agents via temporal curriculum on trajectory depth, improving performance up to 18 points over vanilla OPD and sometimes surpassing the teacher.
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Co-Evolving LLM Decision and Skill Bank Agents for Long-Horizon Tasks
COSPLAY co-evolves an LLM decision agent with a skill bank agent to improve long-horizon game performance, reporting over 25.1% average reward gains versus frontier LLM baselines on single-player benchmarks.
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SkillFlow:Benchmarking Lifelong Skill Discovery and Evolution for Autonomous Agents
SkillFlow benchmark shows lifelong skill evolution yields modest gains for some models like Claude Opus 4.6 but limited or negative utility for others despite high skill usage.
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Diagon: A Programmable Testbed for AI-Agent Cognitive Labor Markets
In a simulated economy of 25 LLM agents, a programmable market testbed shows that market rules and agent configuration reshape trade, quality, and wealth, with transparency and honesty norms backfiring.
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SkVM: Revisiting Language VM for Skills across Heterogenous LLMs and Harnesses
SkVM uses capability profiling and compiler-style techniques to make skills portable across LLMs and harnesses, raising task completion rates while cutting token use by up to 40% and delivering up to 3.2x speedup.
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From Registry to Repository: How AI Agent Skills Are Written, Adapted, and Maintained
AI agent skills are reused mainly as one-time near-verbatim copies; half stay unmodified, later maintenance is additive and local, and the behavioural contract stays almost untouched.
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UniClawBench: A Universal Benchmark for Proactive Agents on Real-World Tasks
A capability-driven benchmark of 400 bilingual real-world tasks shows current proactive agents fail >50% of the time, with framework architecture impacting performance more than base model choice.
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SkillCoach: Self-Evolving Rubrics for Evaluating and Enhancing Agentic Skill-Use
SkillCoach introduces self-evolving rubrics derived from rollouts to evaluate and supervise four process dimensions of agentic skill-use separately from outcome success.
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The Decomposition Is the Fingerprint: Per-Component Identity for Agent Skills
A per-component SimHash fingerprint supplies structural identity for AI agent skills, recovering family membership under paraphrase and refactoring with AUC 0.974 while localizing changes.
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Managing Procedural Memory in LLM Agents: Control, Adaptation, and Evaluation
AFTER benchmark shows single refinement improves LLM agent performance by 3.7-6.7 points and multi-model procedural skills reach 73.1% cross-model accuracy on 382 tasks.
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A Framework for Evaluating Agentic Skills at Scale
The authors developed an evaluation framework that generates 1000 tasks from 500 real-world agent skills, applies instruction-following and goal-completion rubrics, and benchmarks 19 proprietary and open-source model configurations.
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Position: Coding Benchmarks Are Misaligned with Agentic Software Engineering
Coding benchmarks conflate the model with the harness, environment, and verifier into a single end-to-end score, which is misaligned with agentic software engineering.
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SkillCAT: Contrastive, Assessment-Augmented and Topology-AwareSkill Self-Evolution for LLM Agents
Contrastive success/failure evidence, replay-based patch validation, and topology-aware routing improve training-free skill self-evolution for LLM agents.
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SkillJuror: Measuring How Agent Skill Organization Changes Runtime Behavior
Empirical study finds Progressive Disclosure raises distinct resources touched (1.18 to 3.85) and uptake events (1.33 to 3.92) per trajectory, adds 17 passing trials out of 410 (+4.1%), with gains task-dependent.
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Skill Coverage: A Test Adequacy Metric for Agent Skills
Skill coverage measures which natural-language skill constraints an LLM agent trajectory exercises and passes, revealing low coverage on SkillsBench and enabling a 16% recovery of failed tasks via targeted skill emphasis.
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SkillAxe: Sharpening LLM-Authored Agent Skills Through Evaluation-Guided Self-Refinement
SkillAxe is an unsupervised framework that decomposes LLM skill quality into four dimensions to generate improvement briefs, raising pass rates 28% relative on SkillsBench and from 16% to 52% on SpreadsheetBench.
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What Should a Skill Remember? Quality--Cost Trade-offs in Cost-Aware Skill Rewriting for Language Model Agents
Cost-aware skill rewriting that preserves task-relevant operational anchors reduces LLM-agent total token cost by ~7% on a 20-task held-out panel and ~15% across agent stacks while maintaining verifier quality.
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SkillHone: A Harness for Continual Agent Skill Evolution Through Persistent Decision History
Persistent decision history plus role-separated redacted evaluation lets agents continually improve skills across sessions and outperform commercial deep-research and prior skill-evolution baselines.
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Workflow-to-Skill: Skill Creation via Routing-Workflow-Semantics-Attachments Decomposition
W2S framework with RWSA decomposition converts heterogeneous traces into Skills and improves behavioral replay consistency by 10.5% over summarization baselines on 70 Skills.
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SciVisAgentSkills: Design and Evaluation of Agent Skills for Scientific Data Analysis and Visualization
SciVisAgentSkills provides reusable agent skills that raise mean task scores on a 108-task SciVis benchmark when paired with Codex and Claude Code agents.
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Skill-RM: Unifying Heterogeneous Evaluation Criteria via Agent Skill
Skill-RM unifies heterogeneous reward criteria by modeling reward computation as dynamic execution of a reusable Reward-Evaluation Skill within an agent framework.
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SkillGuard: A Permission-Centric Framework for Agent Skill Security
A dual-plane permission framework for LLM agent skills cuts SkillInject attack success by roughly 9 percentage points while nearly preserving benign task success.
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SkillAdaptor: Self-Adapting Skills for LLM Agents from Trajectories
SkillAdaptor introduces step-level failure attribution and targeted skill updates for LLM agents, yielding performance gains on WebShop, PinchBench, and Claw-Eval benchmarks.
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SkillRevise: Improving LLM-Authored Agent Skills via Trace-Conditioned Skill Revision
SkillRevise iteratively refines initial LLM-generated agent skills using execution traces to diagnose defects and apply repairs, raising success rates from 36.05% to 61.63% on SkillsBench across three benchmarks and five LLMs.
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Harnessing Agent Skills: Architectural Patterns and a Reference Architecture for Skill-Mediated LLM Agents
Catalogs ten patterns and synthesizes a four-layer reference architecture for skill harnessing in LLM agents, evaluated via cross-instantiation on eight systems.
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Benchmarks are Not Enough: RAMP for Runtime Assessing of Agentic Models in Production Systems
RAMP evaluates 15 models on production-like serial workflows and reports completion rates collapsing from 100% to 20% with none finishing the full pipeline and costs varying by three orders of magnitude.
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AgensFlow: A Coordination-Policy Substrate for Multi-Agent Systems
AgensFlow learns coordination policies from task trajectories and outperforms fixed pipelines on distributed-systems incident and security-advisory tasks.
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SkillOpt: Executive Strategy for Self-Evolving Agent Skills
SkillOpt introduces a controllable text-space optimizer that evolves agent skills via add/delete/replace edits accepted only on strict held-out validation improvement, reporting consistent gains across 52 model-benchmark-harness combinations.
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From Raw Experience to Skill Consumption: A Systematic Study of Model-Generated Agent Skills
A systematic study across five domains finds model-generated skills yield average gains but non-uniform negative transfer, with a meta-skill improving extraction quality.
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OpenSkillEval: Automatically Auditing the Open Skill Ecosystem for LLM Agents
OpenSkillEval dynamically builds task instances across five application domains to evaluate 30 open skills with over 600 tests, finding that skill use depends heavily on model and framework and that many popular skills do not beat base agents.