mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

Skill2Query: Exploiting Skill Structure to Generate Pseudo-Queries for Agent Skill Retrieval

arXiv 2608.16071 ↗First posted 17 Aug 2026cs.CL cs.IRcited by 2

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

Abstract (arXiv)

Pseudo-query generation can alleviate the supervision bottleneck for agent skill retrieval, but existing document-level approaches typically leave the rich internal relations among capabilities, parameters, and usage examples implicit. As a result, generated queries may be topically relevant to a skill while lacking capability grounding and parameter consistency, raising the question of whether explicitly exploiting a skill document's internal structure can produce more effective retrieval signals. We therefore propose Skill2Query, a framework that first parses a skill document into a Skill Knowledge Graph and then generates pseudo-queries through a three-stage process including style mimicking, query template generation, and parameter filling. The generated queries can be used for offline index augmentation, online query expansion, and retriever training. Four benchmarks (TheoremQA, LogicBench, ToolQA, and CHAMP) are used to evaluate Skill2Query with large-scale skill candidate pools across multiple downstream applications, including skill retrieval, retriever training, and end-to-end agent execution. Using nearly 30K skills across diverse domains, we generate 700K category-diverse pseudo-queries. Skill2Query consistently improves sparse, dense, and skill-routing retrieval, with an average Recall@1 gain of 6.70 percentage points across retrieval settings. Skill2Query-generated training data also achieves the best Recall@1 and nDCG@1 among the evaluated generation baselines. Further evaluations with multiple LLM backends demonstrate that improved skill retrieval translates into higher agent task success rates. Code and resources are available at https://github.com/MatZaharia/Skill2Query.

Key facts. Cited by 2 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 26 of its 44 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 17 Aug 2026.

Builds on

26 of 44 references.

Closest ancestors · 6

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2026SkillJuror: Measuring How Agent Skill Organization Changes Runtime Behavior10 Jun
  2. 2026LatentSkill: From In-Context Textual Skills to In-Weight Latent Skills for LLM Agents4 Jun
  3. 2026Skills on the Fly: Test-Time Adaptive Skill Synthesis for LLM Agents16 May
  4. 2026SkillRet: A Large-Scale Benchmark for Skill Retrieval in LLM Agents7 May
  5. 2026Graph-of-Skills: Dependency-Aware Structural Retrieval for Massive Agent Skills7 Apr
  6. 2025SkillFlow: Scalable and Efficient Agent Skill Retrieval System8 Apr

Other references · 20

  1. 2020Language Models are Few-Shot Learnerscited by 32,419
  2. 2019Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networkscited by 9,170
  3. 2018Representation Learning with Contrastive Predictive Codingcited by 7,777
  4. 2022Self-Instruct: Aligning Language Models with Self-Generated Instructionscited by 2,724
  5. 2015A Diversity-Promoting Objective Function for Neural Conversation Modelscited by 1,077
  6. 2023API-Bank: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Tool-Augmented LLMscited by 591
  7. 2023C-Pack: Packed Resources For General Chinese Embeddingscited by 578
  8. 2022Precise Zero-Shot Dense Retrieval without Relevance Labelscited by 517
  9. 2023ToolQA: A Dataset for LLM Question Answering with External Toolscited by 274
  10. 2022Promptagator: Few-shot Dense Retrieval From 8 Examplescited by 235
  11. 2019Document Expansion by Query Predictioncited by 231
  12. 2023TheoremQA: A Theorem-driven Question Answering datasetcited by 192
8 more
  1. 2021GPL: Generative Pseudo Labeling for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation of Dense Retrievalcited by 119
  2. 2026Externalization in LLM Agents: A Unified Review of Memory, Skills, Protocols and Harness Engineeringcited by 74
  3. 2024Seal-Tools: Self-Instruct Tool Learning Dataset for Agent Tuning and Detailed Benchmarkcited by 63
  4. 2025Retrieval Models Aren't Tool-Savvy: Benchmarking Tool Retrieval for Large Language Modelscited by 47
  5. 2025ToolFactory: Automating Tool Generation by Leveraging LLM to Understand REST API Documentationscited by 8
  6. 2023Let's Chat to Find the APIs: Connecting Human, LLM and Knowledge Graph through AI Chaincited by 7
  7. 2026PORTS: Preference-Optimized Retrievers for Tool Selection with Large Language Modelscited by 4
  8. 2023Noisy Self-Training with Synthetic Queries for Dense Retrievalcited by 3

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 2.

2 papers.

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2026SkillTrace: Traversing a Query-Skill Graph for Composable LLM Agents
  2. 2026SkillPager: Query-Adaptive Intra-Skill Navigation via Semantic Node Retrieval
  3. 2026SkillReason: Reasoning-Enhanced Agent Skill Retrieval for Implicit User Requests
  4. 2026SkillSeek: Revisiting Agent Skill Retrieval at Marketplace Scale
  5. 2026Imagine Before Retrieval: Prospective Skill Retrieval for LLM Agents
  6. 2026SE-GoS: Self-Evolving Graph-of-Skills for Skill Library at Scale
  7. 2026Anything2Skill: Compiling External Knowledge into Reusable Skills for Agents
  8. 2026Comparative Approaches to Agent Retrieval over Large Skill Libraries