mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

SkillHarness: Harnessing Safe Skills for Computer-Use Agents

arXiv 2606.20636 ↗First posted 2 Jun 2026cs.AI cs.CL cs.CRcited by 2

On the map: LLM agents and tool use → Agent threats, guardrails and governance

Abstract (arXiv)

Computer-Use Agents (CUAs) are increasingly deployed in dynamic interactive environments, creating a growing need for continual skill learning during interaction. Recent approaches address this challenge by learning reusable skills from successful trajectories. However, these skill learning methods largely assume static and safe environments, overlooking risks from adversarial interactions (e.g., prompt injections) and environmental dynamics (e.g., pop-ups). In dynamic settings, such assumptions can lead to risky skill learning and brittle execution, undermining the reliability of CUAs. This raises the question: how can CUAs learn and use skills safely in dynamic environments? To address this problem, we propose SkillHarness, a framework for safe skill harnessing in dynamic environments. SkillHarness moves beyond static skill abstractions by modeling skill learning and utilization as a safety-constrained interaction process. Specifically, we introduce the skill boundary that leverages multi-source supervision signals to identify safe skills from interaction trajectories, and construct self-improving safety constraints throughout the skill lifecycle. In addition, SkillHarness introduces selective skill reuse, where tasks are guided to decompose according to context and completed through the selective activation of skill subsets. Our experiments demonstrate that SkillHarness significantly reduces the unsafe rate of learned skills by 57.1% and consistently improves execution stability under dynamic environmental changes, outperforming existing baselines.

Key facts. Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Agent threats, guardrails and governance, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use. Builds on 14 of its 28 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 2 Jun 2026.

Builds on

14 of 28 references.

Closest ancestors · 6

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2026When Skills Lie: Hidden-Comment Injection in LLM Agents11 Feb
  2. 2026Agent Skills in the Wild: An Empirical Study of Security Vulnerabilities at Scale15 Jan
  3. 2025HarmonyGuard: Toward Safety and Utility in Web Agents via Adaptive Policy Enhancement and Dual-Objective Optimization6 Aug
  4. 2025OS-Harm: A Benchmark for Measuring Safety of Computer Use Agents17 Jun
  5. 2025WASP: Benchmarking Web Agent Security Against Prompt Injection Attacks22 Apr
  6. 2024ST-WebAgentBench: A Benchmark for Evaluating Safety and Trustworthiness in Web Agents9 Oct

Other references · 8

  1. 2025Agentic Context Engineering: Evolving Contexts for Self-Improving Language Modelscited by 349
  2. 2026SkillRL: Evolving Agents via Recursive Skill-Augmented Reinforcement Learningcited by 252
  3. 2025SkillWeaver: Web Agents can Self-Improve by Discovering and Honing Skillscited by 174
  4. 2025Inducing Programmatic Skills for Agentic Taskscited by 103
  5. 2025Reinforcement Learning for Self-Improving Agent with Skill Librarycited by 91
  6. 2025PolySkill: Learning Generalizable Skills Through Polymorphic Abstractioncited by 25
  7. 2025Mirage-1: Augmenting and Updating GUI Agent with Hierarchical Multimodal Skillscited by 18
  8. 2025OpenApps: Simulating Environment Variations to Measure UI-Agent Reliabilitycited by 10

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 2.

2 papers.

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2026From Interaction Traces to Persistent Skills: Online Evolution for Computer-Use Agents
  2. 2026CUA-Skill: Develop Skills for Computer Using Agent
  3. 2026SkillHarm: Lifecycle-Aware Skill-Based Attacks via Automated Construction
  4. 2026SkillSafetyBench: Evaluating Agent Safety under Skill-Facing Attack Surfaces
  5. 2026ContinualSkillBench: Can LLM Agents Truly Evolve Their Capabilities?
  6. 2026When Safe Skills Collide: Measuring Compositional Risk in Agent Skill Ecosystems
  7. 2026SkillPoison: Progressive Skill Poisoning via Successful Experiences
  8. 2026Online Skill Learning for Web Agents via State-Grounded Dynamic Retrieval