SkillCorpus is, to the authors' knowledge, the first end-to-end account of when a curated, retrieval-served community corpus improves real agent tasks, and where it does not, and is evaluated end-to-end across three benchmarks.
Abstract
Agent skills, SKILL files that package reusable procedural knowledge for an LLM agent, are a popular mechanism for extending agent capabilities. Public repositories now host them in large and growing numbers, yet these artifacts are fragmented, redundant, and uneven in quality, and their value in practice is unclear. A core question remains open, namely how to consolidate this open-source SKILL ecosystem into a single usable corpus, and what bounds its benefit on real-world agent tasks. We present SkillCorpus, a framework that aggregates, curates, matches, and evaluates the open skill ecosystem at scale. It filters ~821,000 crawled skills through a multi-stage pipeline into 96,401 skills organised by a 16-class taxonomy and three quality facets (utility, robustness, safety), and pairs them with a fine-tuned retrieval-and-selection stack that matches task-relevant skills. We evaluate end-to-end across three benchmarks (SkillsBench, GDPVal, QwenClawBench), two harnesses, and two open backbones with a frontier robustness check. Integrating SkillCorpus yields consistent gains across all three benchmarks, largest on SkillsBench (+7.5 pp). An operational analysis traces the gains to a coverage boundary and a harness boundary. SkillCorpus is, to our knowledge, the first end-to-end account of when a curated, retrieval-served community corpus improves real agent tasks, and where it does not. The dataset, models, and code are available at https://github.com/EverMind-AI/SkillCorpus.
This paper examines how skills may help address bottlenecks of current agents and how they may expand agent capabilities through reusable domain procedures loaded at inference time and outlines open questions in skill construction, composition, evaluation, portability, governance, and security.
Hanwen Xing, Haomin Zhuang, Xuandong Zhao et al.· Proceedings of the 32nd ACM...· 7 citations· ⚡1
DisCo is presented, a skill-powered research agent that creates skills and uses them during research, and yields the AREX-Skill Library, with 5,000+ verified skills distilled from 1,000 widely used ML repositories and organized into 20 areas and 178 capability families.
Jianlyu Chen, Yuyang Hu, Hong-Jin Qian et al.· 1 citation
Anthropic's Agent Skills package reusable procedural know-how for an LLM agent into SKILL.md directories, and open-source aggregations have grown past 230,000 skills, making selection rather than authoring the bottleneck. The standing answer in the literature outsources selection to the agent itself: an LLM-mediated re...
Guanqun Yang, Wen-Long Zhang, Tian Shi et al.· 1 citation
SkillAlign is proposed, a provider-agnostic framework that represents candidate skills as multi-view procedural cards and renders them through alternative exposure interfaces, including full instructions, hints, compressed summaries, workflows, or no exposure, which enables counterfactual evaluation where the task, age...
These findings recast a matched Skill as a hypothesis about a particular Skill-project-model triple rather than a portable asset, reframing injection as a per-deployment routing decision and making length-matched controls and per-model audits a minimum standard for Agent-Skill evaluation.
This paper proposes SkillAlchemy, an admission-centered framework for source-grounded skill creation that identifies implicit requirements through contrastive evidence, admits candidate procedures based on evidence-supported scope, and compiles the admitted content into a grammar-guided skill package.
Heng Wang, Shuyue Wei, Boyi Liu et al.· 0 citations
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