SelSkill applies dual-granularity preference learning to selective skill-or-skip decisions, improving task success by 10.9 points and execution precision by 29.1 points on ALFWorld with Qwen3-8B.
A Comprehensive Survey on Agent Skills: Taxonomy, Techniques, and Applications
4 Pith papers cite this work. Polarity classification is still indexing.
4
Pith papers citing it
abstract
Large language model (LLM)-based agents that reason, plan, and act through tools, memory, and structured interaction are emerging as a promising paradigm for automating complex workflows. Recent systems such as OpenClaw and Claude Code exemplify a broader shift from passive response generation to action-oriented task execution. Yet as agents move toward open-ended, real-world deployment, relying on from-scratch reasoning and low-level tool calls for every task become increasingly inefficient, error-prone, and hard to maintain. This survey examines this challenge through the lens of \emph{agent skills}, which we define as reusable procedural artifacts that coordinate tools, memory, and runtime context under task-specific constraints. Under this view, agents and skills play complementary roles: agents handle high-level reasoning and planning, while skills form the operational layer that enables reliable, reusable, and composable execution. Skills are therefore central to the scalability, robustness, and maintainability of modern agent systems. We organize the literature around four stages of the agent skill lifecycle -- representation, acquisition, retrieval, and evolution -- and review representative methods, ecosystem resources, and application settings across each stage. We conclude by discussing open challenges in quality control, interoperability, safe updating, and long-term capability management. All related resources, including research papers, open-source data, and projects, are collected for the community in \textcolor{blue}{https://github.com/JayLZhou/Awesome-Agent-Skills}.
years
2026 4verdicts
UNVERDICTED 4representative citing papers
Skill-RM unifies heterogeneous reward criteria by modeling reward computation as dynamic execution of a reusable Reward-Evaluation Skill within an agent framework.
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.
Catalogs ten patterns and synthesizes a four-layer reference architecture for skill harnessing in LLM agents, evaluated via cross-instantiation on eight systems.
citing papers explorer
-
Skill or Skip? Learning Selective Skill Invocation in Agentic Tasks via Dual-Granularity Preference Learning
SelSkill applies dual-granularity preference learning to selective skill-or-skip decisions, improving task success by 10.9 points and execution precision by 29.1 points on ALFWorld with Qwen3-8B.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.