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

Agent skills are increasingly optimized by automated feedback loops, producing long structured artifacts whose internal value remains unclear. We study skill...

Bo Shao·Aug 5, 2026·1 min read·Original source ↗
What Is a Skill Worth? Structure-Aware Shapley Valuation of Agent Skills

What Is a Skill Worth? Structure-Aware Shapley Valuation of Agent Skills2608.04562AuthorsBo Shao,Xuejun Liu,Linjun Shou,Tao Li,Junfeng Liuand 3 moreAbstractAgent 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.ResourcesView on Hugging FaceRead PDFArXiv

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