DataCOPE: Unsupervised skill discovery framework for data-analytic agents
Researchers introduce DataCOPE, an unsupervised verifier-guided framework for discovering reusable procedural skills in data-analytic agents without labeled supervision or parameter updates. The system coordinates three components—a data-analytic agent, an unsupervised verifier, and a skill manager for contrastive skill distillation—with task-specific verifier instantiations for report-style and reasoning-style analysis. Evaluated on Deep Data Research and DABStep benchmarks, DataCOPE improves mean scores by 9.71% and 32.30% respectively across four model settings. The approach addresses a key bottleneck in agentic data analysis: acquiring reliable skill supervision at scale.
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agent-skills: Secure Validated Skill Registry for AI Coding Agents
A TypeScript-based open-source skill registry designed to extend AI coding agents including Claude Code, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, and Antigravity with validated, reusable capabilities. The project provides a structured way to add skills to multiple coding agent platforms with a focus on security and validation. It is gaining notable traction with 3,767 total stars and 225 stars added today.
SkillWeaver: Compositional Skill Routing for LLM Agents via Decompose-Retrieve-Compose
Researchers introduce SkillWeaver, a framework for compositional skill routing in LLM agents that decomposes complex queries into atomic sub-tasks, retrieves matching skills from a large library, and composes an executable DAG plan. The paper formalizes the Compositional Skill Routing problem and introduces CompSkillBench, a benchmark of 300 compositional queries over 2,209 real MCP server skills across 24 categories. A key finding is that task decomposition quality is the primary bottleneck, with standard LLM decomposition reaching only 34.2% category recall; the proposed Iterative Skill-Aware Decomposition (SAD) method improves decomposition accuracy from 51.0% to 67.7% in a single iteration. The framework also reduces context window consumption by over 99% compared to naive skill-stuffing approaches.
Systematic Study of Model-Generated Agent Skills Across the Full Skill Lifecycle
This paper presents a utility-grounded evaluation framework for model-generated agent skills, covering the full lifecycle of experience generation, skill extraction, and skill consumption across five agentic task domains. The authors find that while such skills are beneficial on average, they exhibit non-trivial negative transfer, and that skill utility is independent of model scale or baseline task strength. A key finding is that strong extractors are not necessarily strong consumers and vice versa. The work culminates in a 'meta-skill' that guides extraction toward utility-correlated features, consistently improving skill quality and reducing negative transfer.
DABStep: Data Agent Benchmark for Multi-step Reasoning
Hugging Face introduces DABStep, a benchmark designed to evaluate data agents on multi-step reasoning tasks. The benchmark targets agentic systems that must perform complex, sequential data operations rather than single-step queries. It aims to fill a gap in evaluation tooling for realistic data analysis workflows involving tool use and chained reasoning.
K-Dense-AI/scientific-agent-skills: Ready-to-Use Agent Skills Library for Research and Engineering
A Python repository providing a collection of pre-built agent skills targeting research, science, engineering, analysis, finance, and writing tasks. The project has accumulated 24,087 stars with a notable single-day gain of 762 stars, indicating significant community traction. No detailed technical documentation is available from the snippet, but the scope suggests a modular agent tooling library.
RedAct framework protects procedural skills in agent execution traces via selective redaction and watermarking
Researchers introduce RedAct, a framework for releasing agent execution traces without exposing proprietary procedural skills (tool invocations, decision logic, error-recovery strategies). The system localizes sensitive information, rewrites traces while preserving audit-critical evidence, and embeds behavioral watermarks for provenance tracking. To evaluate the approach, the authors construct CapTraceBench, a benchmark of 75 long-horizon tasks and 154 skills across seven domains. RedAct reduces normalized skill transfer from 44.7–67.1% on raw traces to below the no-skill baseline, while watermark detection achieves 93.6–100% true positive rate with under 2% false alarms.
SkillOpt: Systematic Text-Space Optimizer for Self-Evolving Agent Skills
SkillOpt introduces a principled optimization framework for agent skills, treating the skill document as an external trainable state analogous to model weights. A separate optimizer model converts scored rollouts into bounded edits (add/delete/replace) on a skill document, accepting only edits that improve held-out validation scores. Evaluated across six benchmarks, seven target models, and three execution harnesses (direct chat, Codex, Claude Code), SkillOpt achieves best or tied performance on all 52 evaluated cells, lifting GPT-5.5 no-skill accuracy by up to +24.8 points inside the Codex agentic loop. Optimized skill artifacts also transfer across model scales and execution environments without further optimization.
SkillGenBench: Benchmarking Skill Generation Pipelines for LLM Agents
SkillGenBench is a new benchmark designed to evaluate the ability of LLM agents to generate correct, reusable, and executable skills from raw repositories and documents, rather than merely using pre-provided skills. It covers two generation regimes (task-conditioned and task-agnostic) and two procedural sources (repository-grounded and document-grounded), with standardized execution-based evaluation protocols. Experiments across multiple skill-generation methods reveal substantial performance variation and distinct failure modes depending on source type. The benchmark aims to establish skill generation as an independent research problem within agent systems.