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

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.24026 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.24026/

## Key facts

- Cited by 16 papers in the map (data through 14 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.

## Placed in

- LLM agents and tool use / [Agent skill learning and evolution](https://mlsanity.com/agents/agent-skill-learning-and-evolution/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 34)

- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [Toolformer: Language Models Can Teach Themselves to Use Tools](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.04761/) (2023)
- [Dense Passage Retrieval for Open-Domain Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04906/) (2020)
- [Voyager: An Open-Ended Embodied Agent with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16291/) (2023)
- [ToolLLM: Facilitating Large Language Models to Master 16000+ Real-world APIs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.16789/) (2023)
- [Not what you've signed up for: Compromising Real-World LLM-Integrated Applications with Indirect Prompt Injection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.12173/) (2023)
- [The Rise and Potential of Large Language Model Based Agents: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.07864/) (2023)
- [Gorilla: Large Language Model Connected with Massive APIs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.15334/) (2023)
- [Qwen3 Embedding: Advancing Text Embedding and Reranking Through Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.05176/) (2025)
- [BEIR: A Heterogenous Benchmark for Zero-shot Evaluation of Information Retrieval Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08663/) (2021)
- [DeepSeek-V3.2: Pushing the Frontier of Open Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.02556/) (2025)
- [Identifying the Risks of LM Agents with an LM-Emulated Sandbox](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.15817/) (2023)
- [AgentHarm: A Benchmark for Measuring Harmfulness of LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.09024/) (2024)
- [Agent Security Bench (ASB): Formalizing and Benchmarking Attacks and Defenses in LLM-based Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.02644/) (2024)
- [Large Language Model Agent: A Survey on Methodology, Applications and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.21460/) (2025)
- [EASYTOOL: Enhancing LLM-based Agents with Concise Tool Instruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.06201/) (2024)
- [CRAFT: Customizing LLMs by Creating and Retrieving from Specialized Toolsets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.17428/) (2023)
- [Agent Skills for Large Language Models: Architecture, Acquisition, Security, and the Path Forward](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.12430/) (2026)
- [Agent Skills in the Wild: An Empirical Study of Security Vulnerabilities at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.10338/) (2026)
- [SKILL0: In-Context Agentic Reinforcement Learning for Skill Internalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.02268/) (2026)
- [Prompt Flow Integrity to Prevent Privilege Escalation in LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.15547/) (2025)
- [SkillX: Automatically Constructing Skill Knowledge Bases for Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.04804/) (2026)
- [SkillRouter: Skill Routing for LLM Agents at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.22455/) (2026)
- [Graph-of-Skills: Dependency-Aware Structural Retrieval for Massive Agent Skills](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.05333/) (2026)
- [Taming Various Privilege Escalation in LLM-Based Agent Systems: A Mandatory Access Control Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.11893/) (2026)
- [SkillNet: Create, Evaluate, and Connect AI Skills](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.04448/) (2026)
- [Retrieval Models Aren't Tool-Savvy: Benchmarking Tool Retrieval for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.01763/) (2025)
- [ToolRerank: Adaptive and Hierarchy-Aware Reranking for Tool Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.06551/) (2024)
- [SkillAttack: Automated Red Teaming of Agent Skills through Attack Path Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.04989/) (2026)
- [SkillSieve: A Hierarchical Triage Framework for Detecting Malicious AI Agent Skills](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.06550/) (2026)

## Built on by (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [Skill0.5: Joint Skill Internalization and Utilization for Out-of-Distribution Generalization in Agentic Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.28424/) (2026)
- [Agent Skill Evaluation and Evolution: Frameworks and Benchmarks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.11435/) (2026)
- [Dynamic Agent Skills: A Lifecycle Survey and Taxonomy of Evolving Skill Libraries](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.10113/) (2026)
- [Ratchet: How Reliable Must an LLM Judge Be to Retire a Skill?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.22148/) (2026)
- [Task Decomposition-Guided Reranking for Adaptive Agent Skill Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.06283/) (2026)
- [ColluSkill: Adversarial Cross-Skill Composition for Evading Agent Skill Scanners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.09732/) (2026)
- [Skill-RM: Unifying Heterogeneous Evaluation Criteria via Agent Skill](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.03980/) (2026)
- [AIP: A Graph Representation for Learning and Governing Agent Skills](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.04781/) (2026)
- [ObjectGraph: From Document Injection to Knowledge Traversal -- A Native File Format for the Agentic Era](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.27820/) (2026)
- [SkillZip: Contract-Preserving Graph Compression for Scalable Agent Skill Libraries](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.05604/) (2026)
- [SkillEval: Decomposing Agent Skill Quality into Interpretable Signals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.06891/) (2026)
- [Workflow-to-Skill: Skill Creation via Routing-Workflow-Semantics-Attachments Decomposition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.06893/) (2026)
- [Compression, structure, and executor capability: a controlled real-cost decomposition of language-model agent skill optimisation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.03048/) (2026)
- [Grounded Skill Synthesis from Code at Scale for Agentic Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.05571/) (2026)
- [GraphSkillEvo: Evolutionary Optimization of Graph-Structured Agent Skills](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.21749/) (2026)
- [An Empirical Study of Agent Skills' Downstream Utility](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.08875/) (2026)

## 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.