SkillRouter: Skill Routing for LLM Agents at Scale

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Zheng, YanZhao, Zhang, ZhenTao, Ma, Chao, Yu, YuanQiang, Zhu, JiHuai, Wu, Yong, Xu, Tianze, Dong, Baohua, Zhu, Hangcheng, Huang, Ruohui, Yu, Gang
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Zheng, YanZhao
Zhang, ZhenTao
Ma, Chao
Yu, YuanQiang
Zhu, JiHuai
Wu, Yong
Xu, Tianze
Dong, Baohua
Zhu, Hangcheng
Huang, Ruohui
Yu, Gang
author_facet Zheng, YanZhao
Zhang, ZhenTao
Ma, Chao
Yu, YuanQiang
Zhu, JiHuai
Wu, Yong
Xu, Tianze
Dong, Baohua
Zhu, Hangcheng
Huang, Ruohui
Yu, Gang
contents Reusable skills let LLM agents package task-specific procedures, tool affordances, and execution guidance into modular building blocks. As skill ecosystems grow to tens of thousands of entries, exposing every skill at inference time becomes infeasible. This creates a skill-routing problem: given a user task, the system must identify relevant skills before downstream planning or execution. Existing agent stacks often rely on progressive disclosure, exposing only skill names and descriptions while hiding the full implementation body. We examine this design choice on a SkillsBench-derived benchmark with approximately 80K candidate skills, targeting the practically important setting of large skill registries with heavy overlap. Across representative sparse, dense, and reranking baselines on this setting, hiding the skill body causes a 31--44 percentage point drop in routing accuracy, showing that full skill text is a critical routing signal in this setting rather than a minor metadata refinement. Motivated by this finding, we present SkillRouter, a compact 1.2B full-text retrieve-and-rerank pipeline. SkillRouter achieves 74.0% Hit@1 on our benchmark -- the strongest average top-1 routing performance among the baselines we evaluate -- while using 13$\times$ fewer parameters and running 5.8$\times$ faster than the strongest base pipeline. The ranking gains further generalize to a supplementary benchmark independently constructed from three skill sources. In a complementary end-to-end study across four coding agents, routing gains transfer to improved task success, with larger gains for more capable agents.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_22455
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle SkillRouter: Skill Routing for LLM Agents at Scale
Zheng, YanZhao
Zhang, ZhenTao
Ma, Chao
Yu, YuanQiang
Zhu, JiHuai
Wu, Yong
Xu, Tianze
Dong, Baohua
Zhu, Hangcheng
Huang, Ruohui
Yu, Gang
Machine Learning
Reusable skills let LLM agents package task-specific procedures, tool affordances, and execution guidance into modular building blocks. As skill ecosystems grow to tens of thousands of entries, exposing every skill at inference time becomes infeasible. This creates a skill-routing problem: given a user task, the system must identify relevant skills before downstream planning or execution. Existing agent stacks often rely on progressive disclosure, exposing only skill names and descriptions while hiding the full implementation body. We examine this design choice on a SkillsBench-derived benchmark with approximately 80K candidate skills, targeting the practically important setting of large skill registries with heavy overlap. Across representative sparse, dense, and reranking baselines on this setting, hiding the skill body causes a 31--44 percentage point drop in routing accuracy, showing that full skill text is a critical routing signal in this setting rather than a minor metadata refinement. Motivated by this finding, we present SkillRouter, a compact 1.2B full-text retrieve-and-rerank pipeline. SkillRouter achieves 74.0% Hit@1 on our benchmark -- the strongest average top-1 routing performance among the baselines we evaluate -- while using 13$\times$ fewer parameters and running 5.8$\times$ faster than the strongest base pipeline. The ranking gains further generalize to a supplementary benchmark independently constructed from three skill sources. In a complementary end-to-end study across four coding agents, routing gains transfer to improved task success, with larger gains for more capable agents.
title SkillRouter: Skill Routing for LLM Agents at Scale
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.22455