SkillSV: A Structure-Aware Framework for Valuing Agent Skills
An academic article named 'What Is a Skill Worth? Structure-Aware Shapley Valuation of Agent Skills' has been released on arXiv (ID: 2608.04562). This study presents SkillSV, a framework designed to allocate credit to the internal components of a fixed agent skill, including rules, examples, scripts, and heuristics, while maintaining a consistent agent and a specific task distribution. The authors highlight that valuing skills is distinct from assessing data or prompt spans due to the structured nature of skill units, which can be interdependent, organized hierarchically, influence agent actions, and utilize limited prompt context. SkillSV organizes skills into units, dependencies, and hierarchies, ensuring only valid counterfactual skills are assessed. The framework employs paired deletion and length-neutral padding to differentiate content value from context cost, estimating values via a rollout-budgeted estimator for noisy evaluations. The full paper is accessible at https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.04562.
Key facts
- Paper titled 'What Is a Skill Worth? Structure-Aware Shapley Valuation of Agent Skills' published on arXiv.
- arXiv ID: 2608.04562.
- Introduces SkillSV, a structure-aware Shapley-style framework for skill valuation.
- Skill valuation assigns credit to internal units of a fixed skill: rules, examples, scripts, heuristics.
- Skill units are structured: they may depend on other units, belong to a document hierarchy, trigger agent behavior, and consume prompt context.
- SkillSV compiles a skill into units, dependencies, and hierarchy to evaluate only valid counterfactual skills.
- Uses paired deletion and length-neutral padding to separate content value from context cost.
- Estimates values with a rollout-budgeted estimator for noisy agent evaluations.
- Available at https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.04562.
Entities
Institutions
- arXiv