mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

SkillZip: Contract-Preserving Graph Compression for Scalable Agent Skill Libraries

arXiv 2608.05604 ↗First posted 6 Aug 2026cs.CL cs.AIcited by 1

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

Abstract (arXiv)

Large Language Models (LLMs) increasingly act as agents whose procedural knowledge is stored in reusable skill packages and loaded at inference time. As skill libraries grow, a central challenge is to expose the smallest sufficient executable context under a limited context budget. Existing systems struggle to reuse routines below the whole-skill level, preserve procedural contracts during compression, keep compressed routines executable and expandable, and update the compressed library as skills evolve. These challenges reveal a unit mismatch: skills are retrieved as packages, compressed as text, and converted into execution graphs only after retrieval, whereas reliable reuse requires a contract-bearing procedural unit. We propose SkillZip, an execution-aware procedural abstraction framework that performs contract-preserving compression over section-level graphs. SkillZip rewrites recurring contract-valid motifs into reversible ported macros while preserving boundary signatures, dependency closure, verifier reachability, and source-level expansion. At inference time, it hydrates a compact, dependency-closed context and expands macros only when required. ReZip further integrates new skills and revises risky macros using execution evidence. Comprehensive experiments1 on technical and embodied agent benchmarks show SkillZip consistently outperforms the strongest baseline by up to 12.2 points, while achieving a 3.46x compression ratio with 99.2% dependency preservation and 98.7% verifier reachability. Scaling analyses further confirm robust retrieval across skill libraries ranging from 200 to 100K skills.

Key facts. Cited by 1 paper 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 36 of its 59 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 6 Aug 2026.

Builds on

36 of 59 references.

Closest ancestors · 14

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2026Managing Procedural Memory in LLM Agents: Control, Adaptation, and Evaluation22 Jun
  2. 2026SkillDAG: Self-Evolving Typed Skill Graphs for LLM Skill Selection at Scale2 Jun
  3. 2026SkillOps: Managing LLM Agent Skill Libraries as Self-Maintaining Software Ecosystems13 May
  4. 2026SkillRAE: Agent Skill-Based Context Compilation for Retrieval-Augmented Execution11 May
  5. 2026SkillLens: Adaptive Multi-Granularity Skill Reuse for Cost-Efficient LLM Agents8 May
  6. 2026SkillRet: A Large-Scale Benchmark for Skill Retrieval in LLM Agents7 May
  7. 2026Skill Retrieval Augmentation for Agentic AI27 Apr
  8. 2026From Skill Text to Skill Structure: The Scheduling-Structural-Logical Representation for Agent Skills27 Apr
  9. 2026GraSP: Graph-Structured Skill Compositions for LLM Agents20 Apr
  10. 2026Graph-of-Skills: Dependency-Aware Structural Retrieval for Massive Agent Skills7 Apr
  11. 2026SkillReducer: Optimizing LLM Agent Skills for Token Efficiency31 Mar
  12. 2026Organizing, Orchestrating, and Benchmarking Agent Skills at Ecosystem Scale2 Mar
2 more
  1. 2026SkillsBench: Benchmarking How Well Agent Skills Work Across Diverse Tasks13 Feb
  2. 2026Skill-Pro: Learning Reusable Skills from Experience via Non-Parametric PPO for LLM Agents2 Feb

Other references · 22

  1. 2022ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Modelscited by 8,355
  2. 2023Toolformer: Language Models Can Teach Themselves to Use Toolscited by 4,072
  3. 2023Reflexion: Language Agents with Verbal Reinforcement Learningcited by 4,064
  4. 2023AgentBench: Evaluating LLMs as Agentscited by 1,211
  5. 2020ALFWorld: Aligning Text and Embodied Environments for Interactive Learningcited by 1,143
  6. 2023ExpeL: LLM Agents Are Experiential Learnerscited by 814
  7. 2019ALFRED: A Benchmark for Interpreting Grounded Instructions for Everyday Taskscited by 773
  8. 2023API-Bank: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Tool-Augmented LLMscited by 574
  9. 2024LLMLingua-2: Data Distillation for Efficient and Faithful Task-Agnostic Prompt Compressioncited by 343
  10. 2025ReasoningBank: Scaling Agent Self-Evolving with Reasoning Memorycited by 253
  11. 2025MEM1: Learning to Synergize Memory and Reasoning for Efficient Long-Horizon Agentscited by 226
  12. 2025SkillWeaver: Web Agents can Self-Improve by Discovering and Honing Skillscited by 174
10 more
  1. 2025MemGen: Weaving Generative Latent Memory for Self-Evolving Agentscited by 99
  2. 2026SWE-Skills-Bench: Do Agent Skills Actually Help in Real-World Software Engineering?cited by 72
  3. 2025When to use Graphs in RAG: A Comprehensive Analysis for Graph Retrieval-Augmented Generationcited by 46
  4. 2026Experience Compression Spectrum: Unifying Memory, Skills, and Rules in LLM Agentscited by 16
  5. 2026GraphPlanner: Graph Memory-Augmented Agentic Routing for Multi-Agent LLMscited by 10
  6. 2020SSumM: Sparse Summarization of Massive Graphscited by 9
  7. 2025HiPRAG: Hierarchical Process Rewards for Efficient Agentic Retrieval Augmented Generationcited by 9
  8. 2026Group of Skills: Group-Structured Skill Retrieval for Agent Skill Librariescited by 9
  9. 2020Incremental Lossless Graph Summarizationcited by 5
  10. 2026AIP: A Graph Representation for Learning and Governing Agent Skillscited by 3

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Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 1.

1 paper.

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2026SkillZip: Evaluation-Free Skill Compression for Self-Evolving Agents by Discovering Reusable Structure
  2. 2026Skill-as-Pseudocode: Refactoring Skill Libraries to Pseudocode for LLM Agents
  3. 2026AgentCompress: Task-Aware Compression for Affordable Large Language Model Agents
  4. 2026Control Under Compression: Reliability Frontiers for Tool-Using Agents
  5. 2026SkillRevise: Improving LLM-Authored Agent Skills via Trace-Conditioned Skill Revision
  6. 2026Subagents vs Agent Skills: Executing Reusable Knowledge for Long-Horizon Agentic Tasks
  7. 2026Evidence-Calibrated Runtime Reconstruction for Agent Skills Across Heterogeneous Coding Agents
  8. 2026Beyond Token Savings: A Systematic Study of Context Compression in LLM Agents