mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

Skills Know Their Neighbors: Cluster-Contrastive Capability Pages for Skill Retrieval

arXiv 2608.04482 ↗First posted 5 Aug 2026cs.IRcited by 3

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

Abstract (arXiv)

As skill libraries grow, large language model agents must retrieve reusable skills from candidates that often share the same topic and vocabulary but implement different capabilities. Retrieval is limited not only by the scorer but also by the text being scored: a document may describe what a skill does without stating which similar requests should be routed elsewhere. We formalize a skill's capability as its executable region, the set of queries it can solve, and view its document as a lossy observation of that region. This view exposes a document-imposed component of retrieval error that cannot be removed by improving the retriever alone. We therefore propose Capability Pages, cluster-contrastive skill representations containing a positive trigger Tpos, a negative boundary Tneg, and a discriminative body B. An offline compiler compares neighboring skills to write these fields. At inference time, the index uses Tpos and B for candidate recall, while the router uses Tneg to reject confusable alternatives. On SRA-Bench, which contains 26,262 skills and 5,400 questions from six datasets, Capability Pages improve Recall@10 for all five tested retrievers, with a mean gain of 2.94 points. Adding Tneg to candidate cards improves end-to-end task success by 3.62 points on average across four executors and six datasets. A transfer evaluation on Chinese SSL-SkillDiscovery reaches 73.07% MRR@50 using the same encoder across conditions. Capability Pages require no modification to the online models; they improve routing by rewriting the offline skill library.

Key facts. Cited by 3 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. First posted on arXiv 5 Aug 2026.

Builds on

No reference list yet.

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 3.

3 papers.

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2026SkillSight: Calibrating Generic Content Bias for Skill Retrieval
  2. 2026Skill Is Not Document: Query-Conditioned Compatibility for LLM Agent Skill Routing
  3. 2026SkillTrace: Traversing a Query-Skill Graph for Composable LLM Agents
  4. 2026SkillPager: Query-Adaptive Intra-Skill Navigation via Semantic Node Retrieval
  5. 2026SkillReason: Reasoning-Enhanced Agent Skill Retrieval for Implicit User Requests
  6. 2026Skill Following: Evaluating Actual Skill Use in Retrieval-Enabled LLM Agents
  7. 2026Beyond Top-k Skill Retrieval: Diversity-Aware Skill Routing for LLM Agents
  8. 2026Graph-of-Skills: Dependency-Aware Structural Retrieval for Massive Agent Skills