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Optimal Skill Selection for LLM Agents with Provable Bicriteria Guarantees

Research LLM Agents

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TL;DR - This paper formulates context-budgeted skill selection for LLM agents as submodular optimization and introduces Best Prefix Selection (BPS), a polynomial-time algorithm with a provably optimal bicriteria approximation. BPS substantially improves task success while using fewer tokens than the strongest released router tested.

  • Models skill selection as maximizing monotone submodular benefit minus context penalty under a hard token budget.
  • Proves BPS achieves a bicriteria ((1-1/e, 1)) approximation, with a benefit coefficient that is optimal in polynomial time.
  • On a contamination-controlled BigCodeBench variant, BPS reaches 0.73 task success versus 0.20–0.52 for skill routers, text retrievers, and executor-based selection.
  • BPS uses 28% fewer tokens than the strongest released router.

Sources (1)

Optimal Skill Selection for LLM Agents with Provable Bicriteria Guarantees

arXiv cs.AI Yu Chen, Ruishuo Chen, Xun Wang, Zhuoran Li, Longbo Huang 2026-08-20 arXiv:2608.19993
Public signals Semantic Scholar citations 0 · Semantic Scholar influential citations 0
Providers: Hugging Face · N/A OpenAlex · N/A Publisher · N/A Semantic Scholar · Citations 0 · Influential citations 0 X · N/A Fetched 2026-09-15 14:29:57.985083 UTC

TL;DR - This paper formulates context-budgeted skill selection for LLM agents as submodular optimization and introduces Best Prefix Selection (BPS), a polynomial-time algorithm with a provably optimal bicriteria approximation. BPS substantially improves task success while using fewer tokens than the strongest released router tested.

  • Models skill selection as maximizing monotone submodular benefit minus context penalty under a hard token budget.
  • Proves BPS achieves a bicriteria ((1-1/e, 1)) approximation, with a benefit coefficient that is optimal in polynomial time.
  • On a contamination-controlled BigCodeBench variant, BPS reaches 0.73 task success versus 0.20–0.52 for skill routers, text retrievers, and executor-based selection.
  • BPS uses 28% fewer tokens than the strongest released router.
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