This paper introduces SkillTrace, which organizes the user query into a semantic hierarchy, matches skill queries and candidates, and propagates over the skill dependencies, and delivers consistent improvements across different backbone language models, demonstrating the generality and robustness of graph-based skill retrieval.
Abstract
Large language model agents increasingly solve complex tasks by composing reusable skills from a library. To address this, the key challenge is not merely to retrieve individually relevant skills, but to identify a complete and executable skill composition. In this paper, we argue that this problem can be solved in a graph with three levels: compositional relations among skill queries, similarity between queries and candidates in the skill library, and the dependencies among the selected candidates. We introduce SkillTrace, which organizes the user query into a semantic hierarchy, matches skill queries and candidates, and propagates over the skill dependencies. Experiments on SkillsBench and ALFWorld demonstrate that SkillTrace achieves state-of-the-art performance, reaching a success rate of 53.17% on SkillsBench and 91.43% on ALFWorld. SkillTrace also delivers consistent improvements across different backbone language models, demonstrating the generality and robustness of graph-based skill retrieval.
Experiments show that HiSkill outperforms state-of-the-art baselines while reducing inference token consumption, demonstrating the effectiveness of bridging high-level skills and executable action grounding through a hierarchical skill graph.
General-purpose skills promise reusable procedural knowledge for language agents, yet semantic relevance does not guarantee execution utility: a retrieved skill may encode assumptions that conflict with the current task, execution environment, or other retrieved skills. We formalize this problem as the skill--execution misfit. To address it, we propose SkillAligner, a training-free execution-time skill adaptation framework that treats retrieved skills as adaptable drafts rather than fixed instructions. Before execution, SkillAligner performs a one-time joint adaptation that specializes useful skill fragments to task requirements, aligns their procedural assumptions with the available execution interface, and composes the resulting guidance by resolving dependencies, conflicts, and redundancy across skills. The adapted content is consolidated into a compact execution guide and reused throughout the subsequent trajectory. Extensive experiments across diverse agent benchmarks and model backbones show that SkillAligner substantially improves task performance over existing skill-use baselines, reduces skill-induced regressions at the instance level, and lowers total inference cost.
Qinfeng Li, Dalin He, Yuntai Bao et al.· 0 citations
SkillReason-Bench is introduced, a large-scale cross-domain benchmark containing 3,729 queries and a retrieval corpus of 61,228 skills spanning nine domains and SkillRea- son is proposed, a two-stage framework that uses chain-of-thought rea- soning as training-time supervision for skill retrieval.
Donghong Jiang, Endian Lin, Luoping Cui et al.· 0 citations
Agents backed by large skill libraries must decide which skills to load and in what order. Loading the entire library into context is expensive and provides no structure for autonomous sequencing. We study two systems for this problem over a corpus of 690 skills: a hybrid ranker combining lexical and dense-embedding retrieval for sparse, on-demand loading, and a typed knowledge graph encoding workflow relations such as prerequisites, data flow, and ordering. On a set of 117 realistic, non-echoing queries, the hybrid ranker retrieves the correct skill within the top five in 73.5% +/- 8.0 of cases, leaving roughly a quarter of queries unserved. When used as the design intended (substituting graph neighbours for additional ranked results at matched token budget), the graph is significantly worse (-11.2 points, p = 0.0007). Its LLM-generated edge layer adds nothing over neighbours obtained free from a local embedding pass, and 73% of the queries the ranker misses are not reachable through the graph at all. We attribute this to a pre-filter topology bound. Because the graph's candidate edges are drawn from the same embedding neighbourhood the ranker already searches, 98.6% of typed edges connect skills the ranker had already surfaced together. The graph can enrich relation semantics but cannot extend retrieval reach. We further show that evaluating on author-written queries overstates hit@5 by up to 44 points, which would have hidden these results entirely. Our contribution is a mechanistic account of why added structure does not improve retrieval over a strong ranker, and identify the conditions under which adding structural interdependence into the retrieval is optimal.
SkillZip is proposed, an execution-aware procedural abstraction framework that performs contract-preserving compression over section-level graphs that hydrates a compact, dependency-closed context and expands macros only when required.
Xingyu Tan, Xiaoyang Wang, Qing Liu et al.· 2 citations
SkillCommit is an online skill evolution framework that continuously transforms experience into a hierarchical library of reusable skills, enabling cross-model experience transfer and consistently improves agent performance across diverse domains.
Yu He, Weikai Yang· 0 citations
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