# Knowledge-as-Skill: A Structural Design for Autonomous Knowledge-Base Use by LLM Agents

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.25991 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.25991/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Agentic RAG, agents and memory, one of 15 directions in Retrieval-augmented generation.
- Builds on 1 of its 8 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Sep 2026.

## Placed in

- Retrieval-augmented generation / [Agentic RAG, agents and memory](https://mlsanity.com/rag/agentic-rag-agents-and-memory/)
- LLM agents and tool use / [Web, search, and research agents](https://mlsanity.com/agents/web-search-and-research-agents/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11401/) (2020)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) gives large language models (LLMs) access to external knowledge, but its conventional retrieve-concatenate-generate pipeline makes retrieval decisions on behalf of the model. As tool use and agent loops become more reliable, an agent can decide whether to retrieve, what to inspect, and when to stop. This shift exposes a new bottleneck: the agent may not know what a knowledge base contains. Traditional knowledge bases expose documents as anonymous text chunks with limited information about scope, purpose, provenance, or relations. We propose Knowledge-as-Skill, an organization scheme that makes a knowledge base discoverable, navigable, and self-descriptive. It has three layers: a discovery layer centered on SKILL.md; a navigation layer with one index.md per directory; and a knowledge layer containing documents with YAML frontmatter for topic, type, provenance, and lifecycle. The design follows the Open Knowledge Format (OKF) and the Skill protocol without modifying the agent framework. We also provide knowledge-as-skill, a pipeline for converting heterogeneous collections of PDFs, Word files, web exports, and notes into this structure. In a preliminary evaluation on the WixQA enterprise customer-support benchmark, our setup obtains 0.889 Factuality and 0.816 Context Recall, compared with reported Corpus2Skill values of 0.767 and 0.708. It obtains slightly lower Faithfulness, lower Context Precision, and more interaction turns. Because the models, prompts, and knowledge-package construction differ, these results are directional cross-work evidence rather than a controlled comparison.