Skill Availability and Presentation Granularity in Large-Language-Model Agents: A Controlled SkillsBench Study

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2605.31408v1
• Date: Fri, 29 May 2026 15:12:24 GMT
• Title: Skill Availability and Presentation Granularity in Large-Language-Model Agents: A Controlled SkillsBench Study
• Abstract summary: This article studies whether the presentation of controlled skill knowledge changes downstream task success.<n>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.
• Score: 1.6787220460106658
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• 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.

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