What Is a Skill Worth? Structure-Aware Shapley Valuation of Agent Skills

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2608.04562v1
• Date: Wed, 05 Aug 2026 07:56:26 GMT
• Title: What Is a Skill Worth? Structure-Aware Shapley Valuation of Agent Skills
• Abstract summary: We introduce SkillSV, a structure-aware framework for skill valuation.<n> SkillSV compiles a skill into units, dependencies, and hierarchy, so that only valid counterfactual skills are evaluated.<n>It estimates the resulting values with a rollout-budgeted estimator for noisy agent evaluations.
• Score: 18.13304162006297
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: Agent skills are increasingly optimized by automated feedback loops, producing long structured artifacts whose internal value remains unclear. We study skill valuation: assigning credit to the internal units of a fixed skill, such as rules, examples, scripts, and heuristics, under a fixed agent and held-out task distribution. Skill valuation differs from data or prompt-span valuation because skill units are structured: they may depend on other units, belong to a document hierarchy, trigger agent behavior, and consume limited prompt context. We introduce SkillSV, a structure-aware Shapley-style framework for skill valuation. SkillSV compiles a skill into units, dependencies, and hierarchy, so that only valid counterfactual skills are evaluated. It uses paired deletion and length-neutral padding to separate content value from context cost, and estimates the resulting values with a rollout-budgeted estimator for noisy agent evaluations. On four agentic benchmarks, we assess the faithfulness, actionability, and explanation of SkillSV: it recovers unit interactions, preserves aggregate skill lift, and guides safe pruning and compression.

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