mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

From Skill Text to Skill Structure: The Scheduling-Structural-Logical Representation for Agent Skills

arXiv 2604.24026 ↗First posted 27 Apr 2026cs.CL cs.AIcited by 15

On the map: LLM agents and tool use → Agent skill learning and evolution

Abstract (arXiv)

Large language model (LLM) agents increasingly rely on reusable skills: capability packages that combine instructions, control flow, constraints, and tool calls. In current agent systems, however, skills are still represented by text-heavy artifacts, mainly SKILL{.}md-style documents whose machine-usable evidence remains embedded largely in natural-language descriptions. As a result, skill-centered agent systems face a representation problem: both managing skill collections and using skills during agent execution require reasoning over invocation interfaces, execution structure, and concrete side effects, but these signals are often entangled in a single textual surface. An explicit representation of skill knowledge may therefore help make these artifacts easier for machines to acquire and leverage. Drawing on Memory Organization Packets, Script Theory, and Conceptual Dependency from Schank and Abelson's classical work on cognitive linguistic representation, we introduce what is, to our knowledge, the first structured representation for agent skill artifacts that disentangles skill-level scheduling signals, scene-level execution structure, and logic-level action/resource-use evidence: the Scheduling-Structural-Logical (SSL) representation. We instantiate SSL with an LLM-based normalizer and evaluate SSL-derived representations in two tasks, Skill Discovery and Risk Assessment. The experiment shows that SSL significantly outperforms the text-only baselines: in Skill Discovery, MRR@50 improves from 0.649 to 0.729; in Risk Assessment, macro F1 improves from 0.409 to 0.509. These findings suggest that an explicit, source-grounded structure can make agent skills easier to search and review, positioning SSL as a practical step toward more inspectable, reusable, and operationally actionable skill representations, rather than a finished standard or end-to-end skill-management mechanism.

Key facts. Cited by 15 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Agent skill learning and evolution, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use. Builds on 34 of its 44 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 27 Apr 2026.

Builds on

34 of 44 references.

Closest ancestors · 5

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2026Graph-of-Skills: Dependency-Aware Structural Retrieval for Massive Agent Skills7 Apr
  2. 2026SkillX: Automatically Constructing Skill Knowledge Bases for Agents6 Apr
  3. 2026SKILL0: In-Context Agentic Reinforcement Learning for Skill Internalization2 Apr
  4. 2026SkillRouter: Skill Routing for LLM Agents at Scale23 Mar
  5. 2026Agent Skills for Large Language Models: Architecture, Acquisition, Security, and the Path Forward12 Feb

Other references · 29

  1. 2019Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networkscited by 9,049
  2. 2023Toolformer: Language Models Can Teach Themselves to Use Toolscited by 4,072
  3. 2020Dense Passage Retrieval for Open-Domain Question Answeringcited by 3,779
  4. 2023Voyager: An Open-Ended Embodied Agent with Large Language Modelscited by 2,081
  5. 2023ToolLLM: Facilitating Large Language Models to Master 16000+ Real-world APIscited by 1,880
  6. 2023The Rise and Potential of Large Language Model Based Agents: A Surveycited by 1,422
  7. 2023Not what you've signed up for: Compromising Real-World LLM-Integrated Applications with Indirect Prompt Injectioncited by 1,339
  8. 2023Gorilla: Large Language Model Connected with Massive APIscited by 1,302
  9. 2021BEIR: A Heterogenous Benchmark for Zero-shot Evaluation of Information Retrieval Modelscited by 1,225
  10. 2025Qwen3 Embedding: Advancing Text Embedding and Reranking Through Foundation Modelscited by 1,175
  11. 2025DeepSeek-V3.2: Pushing the Frontier of Open Large Language Modelscited by 755
  12. 2023Identifying the Risks of LM Agents with an LM-Emulated Sandboxcited by 514
17 more
  1. 2024AgentHarm: A Benchmark for Measuring Harmfulness of LLM Agentscited by 406
  2. 2024Agent Security Bench (ASB): Formalizing and Benchmarking Attacks and Defenses in LLM-based Agentscited by 341
  3. 2025Large Language Model Agent: A Survey on Methodology, Applications and Challengescited by 194
  4. 2024EASYTOOL: Enhancing LLM-based Agents with Concise Tool Instructioncited by 153
  5. 2023CRAFT: Customizing LLMs by Creating and Retrieving from Specialized Toolsetscited by 122
  6. 2026Agent Skills in the Wild: An Empirical Study of Security Vulnerabilities at Scalecited by 94
  7. 2025Prompt Flow Integrity to Prevent Privilege Escalation in LLM Agentscited by 81
  8. 2026Taming Various Privilege Escalation in LLM-Based Agent Systems: A Mandatory Access Control Frameworkcited by 50
  9. 2026SkillNet: Create, Evaluate, and Connect AI Skillscited by 48
  10. 2025Retrieval Models Aren't Tool-Savvy: Benchmarking Tool Retrieval for Large Language Modelscited by 46
  11. 2024ToolRerank: Adaptive and Hierarchy-Aware Reranking for Tool Retrievalcited by 40
  12. 2026SkillAttack: Automated Red Teaming of Agent Skills through Attack Path Refinementcited by 24
  13. 2026SkillSieve: A Hierarchical Triage Framework for Detecting Malicious AI Agent Skillscited by 18
  14. 2025Tools are under-documented: Simple Document Expansion Boosts Tool Retrievalcited by 12
  15. 2026The Evolution of Tool Use in LLM Agents: From Single-Tool Call to Multi-Tool Orchestrationcited by 11
  16. 2026Towards Secure Agent Skills: Architecture, Threat Taxonomy, and Security Analysiscited by 11
  17. 2025MassTool: A Multi-Task Search-Based Tool Retrieval Framework for Large Language Modelscited by 3

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Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 15.

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  1. 2026Subagents vs Agent Skills: Executing Reusable Knowledge for Long-Horizon Agentic Tasks
  2. 2026SkillJuror: Measuring How Agent Skill Organization Changes Runtime Behavior
  3. 2026A Comprehensive Survey on Agent Skills: Taxonomy, Techniques, and Applications
  4. 2026SkillCorpus: Consolidating and Evaluating the Open Skill Ecosystem for Real-World LLM Agents
  5. 2026Skill-Use: Can LLMs Actually Use Skills in Agentic Harnesses?
  6. 2026Rep2Skill: Representation-Guided Skill Self-Evolution for LLM Agents
  7. 2026Agent Skills: A Data-Driven Analysis of Claude Skills for Extending Large Language Model Functionality
  8. 2026LatentSkill: From In-Context Textual Skills to In-Weight Latent Skills for LLM Agents