SkillZip: Contract-Preserving Graph Compression for Scalable Agent Skill Libraries

arXiv:2608.05604 · cs.CL, cs.AI · Submitted 2026-08-06 · Read on arXiv

Xingyu Tan, Xiaoyang Wang, Qing Liu, Xiwei Xu, Xin Yuan, Liming Zhu, Wenjie Zhang

cs.CL, cs.AI

Submitted: 2026-08-06

License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

The gist: Large Language Models (LLMs) increasingly act as agents whose procedural knowledge is stored in reusable skill packages and loaded at inference time.

Terminology

Abstract

Large Language Models (LLMs) increasingly act as agents whose procedural knowledge is stored in reusable skill packages and loaded at inference time. As skill libraries grow, a central challenge is to expose the smallest sufficient executable context under a limited context budget. Existing systems struggle to reuse routines below the whole-skill level, preserve procedural contracts during compression, keep compressed routines executable and expandable, and update the compressed library as skills evolve. These challenges reveal a unit mismatch: skills are retrieved as packages, compressed as text, and converted into execution graphs only after retrieval, whereas reliable reuse requires a contract-bearing procedural unit. We propose SkillZip, an execution-aware procedural abstraction framework that performs contract-preserving compression over section-level graphs. SkillZip rewrites recurring contract-valid motifs into reversible ported macros while preserving boundary signatures, dependency closure, verifier reachability, and source-level expansion. At inference time, it hydrates a compact, dependency-closed context and expands macros only when required. ReZip further integrates new skills and revises risky macros using execution evidence. Comprehensive experiments1 on technical and embodied agent benchmarks show SkillZip consistently outperforms the strongest baseline by up to 12.2 points, while achieving a 3.46x compression ratio with 99.2% dependency preservation and 98.7% verifier reachability. Scaling analyses further confirm robust retrieval across skill libraries ranging from 200 to 100K skills.

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