Skill Drift Is Contract Violation: Proactive Maintenance for LLM Agent Skill Libraries
On the map: LLM agents and tool use → Agent skill learning and evolution
Abstract (arXiv)
LLM agents increasingly rely on reusable skill libraries, but these skills silently decay as the external services, packages, APIs, and configurations they reference evolve. Existing monitors detect such changes at the wrong granularity: they observe values, not the role those values play in a skill. A version string in a comment is noise; the same string in a pinned dependency is an operational obligation. We formulate skill drift as contract violation and introduce sgname, which extracts executable environment contracts from skill documents and validates only those role-bearing assumptions against known or live conditions. This distinction turns noisy monitoring into a precision-first maintenance signal. Contract-free CI probes produce 40% false positives, while sgname raises zero false alarms over 599 no-drift and hard-negative cases (Wilson 95% CI [0,0.6]%). In known-drift verification, sgname achieves 100% precision and 76% recall with the strongest backbone; in a pre-registered study over 49 real skills, it discovers live drift with 86% conservative precision. Violated contracts also make repair actionable, improving one-round success from 10% without localization to 78%. We release dbname, an 880-pair benchmark for skill degradation.
Key facts. Cited by 3 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 27 of its 33 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 9 May 2026.
Builds on
27 of 33 references.
Closest ancestors · 5
Same direction, newest first
- 2026GraSP: Graph-Structured Skill Compositions for LLM Agents20 Apr
- 2026SkillForge: Forging Domain-Specific, Self-Evolving Agent Skills in Cloud Technical Support9 Apr
- 2026SoK: Agentic Skills -- Beyond Tool Use in LLM Agents24 Feb
- 2026SkillsBench: Benchmarking How Well Agent Skills Work Across Diverse Tasks13 Feb
- 2026Agent Skills for Large Language Models: Architecture, Acquisition, Security, and the Path Forward12 Feb
Other references · 22
- 2022Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Modelscited by 12,302
- 2022ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Modelscited by 8,355
- 2023Reflexion: Language Agents with Verbal Reinforcement Learningcited by 4,064
- 2023Generative Agents: Interactive Simulacra of Human Behaviorcited by 3,500
- 2023Self-Refine: Iterative Refinement with Self-Feedbackcited by 3,317
- 2023SWE-bench: Can Language Models Resolve Real-World GitHub Issues?cited by 3,193
- 2023Voyager: An Open-Ended Embodied Agent with Large Language Modelscited by 2,081
- 2023AgentBench: Evaluating LLMs as Agentscited by 1,211
- 2023Teaching Large Language Models to Self-Debugcited by 963
- 2023Graph of Thoughts: Solving Elaborate Problems with Large Language Modelscited by 873
- 2023Plan-and-Solve Prompting: Improving Zero-Shot Chain-of-Thought Reasoning by Large Language Modelscited by 550
- 2024RepairAgent: An Autonomous, LLM-Based Agent for Program Repaircited by 225
10 more
- 2026SWE-Skills-Bench: Do Agent Skills Actually Help in Real-World Software Engineering?cited by 72
- 2024Scaling Instructable Agents Across Many Simulated Worldscited by 67
- 2024Building Guardrails for Large Language Modelscited by 61
- 2026Towards Verifiably Safe Tool Use for LLM Agentscited by 34
- 2026Agent Behavioral Contracts: Formal Specification and Runtime Enforcement for Reliable Autonomous AI Agentscited by 18
- 2026Intent Formalization: A Grand Challenge for Reliable Coding in the Age of AI Agentscited by 8
- 2026Structured Security Auditing and Robustness Enhancement for Untrusted Agent Skillscited by 6
- 2026RGFL: Reasoning Guided Fault Localization for Automated Program Repair Using Large Language Modelscited by 5
- 2026CodeSpecBench: Benchmarking LLMs for Executable Behavioral Specification Generationcited by 2
- 2026RIVA: Leveraging LLM Agents for Reliable Configuration Drift Detectioncited by 1
Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2026: 3.
3 papers.
- 2026ERRAND: Budgeted Maintenance of Agent Memorycited by 1
- 2026Repo2Skill-Evo: Repository Skills Go Stale in Silencecited by 0
- 2026Learning from Research: Toward Lifelong Agent Harness Evolutioncited by 0
- 2026Learning from Research: Toward Lifelong Agent Harness Evolution30 Sep 2026
- 2026ERRAND: Budgeted Maintenance of Agent Memory2 Sep 2026
- 2026Repo2Skill-Evo: Repository Skills Go Stale in Silence22 Aug 2026
Similar, not cited
Close in wording, no citation either way
- 2026SkillTrace: Multi-Trace Provenance Auditing for LLM-Agent Skill Reuse
- 2026SkillAudit: Ground-Truth-Free Skill Evolution via Paired Trajectory Auditing
- 2026SkillScriptBench: Benchmarking Self-Evolution of Executable Agent Skill Packages Beyond Markdown
- 2026Practice Makes Unsafe: Skill Misevolution in Self-Improving LLM Agents
- 2026SkillOps: Managing LLM Agent Skill Libraries as Self-Maintaining Software Ecosystems
- 2026Library Drift: Diagnosing and Fixing a Silent Failure Mode in Self-Evolving LLM Skill Libraries
- 2026SkillRevise: Improving LLM-Authored Agent Skills via Trace-Conditioned Skill Revision
- 2026SLBench: Evaluating How LLM Agents Follow Logical Relations in Skills