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    Paper Flags Bias in LLM Agent Skill Tests

    Analysis of retrieval-enabled LLM agents shows standard tests mix unrelated tasks.

    DA
    1 Source, 28d ago, first seen 28d ago

    TLDR

    DAIR.AI posted about work by Seonghyeon Cho and Chanjun Park at Korea University. The authors argue that common checks for skill retrieval in LLM agents compare retrieved-skill tasks against no-skill tasks. Because those tasks differ, the comparison mixes selection effects with any real skill benefit. They note that a skill improving an aggregate score can still reduce performance on every individual task it touches. The post links an arXiv paper titled Skill Following: Evaluating Actual Skill Use in Retrieval-Enabled LLM Agents.

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    1 Source, first seen 28d ago

    Combined views

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    1 Source, first seen 28d ago

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    10 comments
    54 saves
    7 reposts

    Sentiment

    Positive——Negative

    Summary

    Not enough discussion yet.

    No sentiment analysis available yet.

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    1 Source

    @dair_aiGood measurement work on whether retrieved agent skills actually help. They report that agent skills that lift your aggregate score can be hurting every task they touch. The usual way of checking compares tasks where a skill was retrieved against tasks where none was. Those are different tasks, so the comparison mixes the effect of retrieval with the effect of which tasks trigger it. The fix presented in the paper is a matched comparison. Retrieval-Invoked Actual-Use Effect runs the same task twice, once with skills enabled and once disabled, and counts only tasks where the agent actually retrieved something. Across 17 LLMs on coding and math, models frequently show positive aggregate retrieval lift alongside a negative same-task effect. On MBPP+, several models that look beneficial system-wide are hurting themselves on exactly the tasks where retrieval fired. Anyone maintaining a skills directory can run this against their own stack today. Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.00549 Chat with Paper: https://academy.dair.ai/papers/skill-following-evaluating-actual-skill-use-in-retrieval-enabled-llm-agents-2609.00549

    1 Source

    @dair_aiGood measurement work on whether retrieved agent skills actually help. They report that agent skills that lift your aggregate score can be hurting every task they touch. The usual way of checking compares tasks where a skill was retrieved against tasks where none was. Those are different tasks, so the comparison mixes the effect of retrieval with the effect of which tasks trigger it. The fix presented in the paper is a matched comparison. Retrieval-Invoked Actual-Use Effect runs the same task twice, once with skills enabled and once disabled, and counts only tasks where the agent actually retrieved something. Across 17 LLMs on coding and math, models frequently show positive aggregate retrieval lift alongside a negative same-task effect. On MBPP+, several models that look beneficial system-wide are hurting themselves on exactly the tasks where retrieval fired. Anyone maintaining a skills directory can run this against their own stack today. Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.00549 Chat with Paper: https://academy.dair.ai/papers/skill-following-evaluating-actual-skill-use-in-retrieval-enabled-llm-agents-2609.00549