Skill Availability and Presentation Granularity in Large-Language-Model Agents: A Controlled SkillsBench Study
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Computer Science > Computation and Language
Title:Skill Availability and Presentation Granularity in Large-Language-Model Agents: A Controlled SkillsBench Study
Abstract:Skill documents provide procedural knowledge to large-language-model agents at inference time. This article studies whether the presentation granularity of controlled skill knowledge changes downstream task success. The experiment uses a pinned SkillsBench version, a 30-task domain-balanced subset validated by official oracle runs, two reasoning-enabled model configurations, six skill conditions, and five trials per task-condition-model cell. Skill availability is the clearest empirical signal. Relative to no skill, skill conditions increase task-mean pass rate by 26.7 to 36.0 percentage points for GPT-5.5 and by 18.0 to 26.0 percentage points for DeepSeek V4-Flash. The final data contain 1,800 rows, with 900 rows for each model. The task is the inference unit. Five trials are aggregated within each task-condition-model cell before paired contrasts are estimated over 30 tasks. The primary presentation contrasts are smaller and uncertain. Low-abstraction guidance differs from high-abstraction guidance by +0.7 percentage points for GPT-5.5 and -6.7 percentage points for DeepSeek V4-Flash, with both 95% bootstrap confidence intervals crossing zero. Adding one worked example to medium-abstraction guidance differs from the no-example variant by +0.7 and +1.3 percentage points. Mean-reward robustness checks preserve the same substantive conclusion. In this controlled subset, skill availability is associated with higher success than no skill, while the tested presentation-granularity changes yield small, uncertain, and model-dependent effects.
| Subjects: | Computation and Language (cs.CL); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Machine Learning (cs.LG) |
| ACM classes: | I.2.7 |
| Cite as: | arXiv:2605.31408 [cs.CL] |
| (or arXiv:2605.31408v1 [cs.CL] for this version) | |
| https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2605.31408
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
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