M-SQE: Multilingual Skill Quality Estimation for Enhancing Language Equality in Agentic Skill Use

Abstract:Agent skills, reusable procedural documents that extend LLM agents beyond their parametric memory, have become an important interface for deploying agents on real-world tasks. Community-maintained skill libraries built around this interface are growing rapidly. However, this ecosystem remains deeply English-centric: our audit finds that low-resource languages such as Swahili and Hindi have no in-language skill content, so retrieval often returns a skill written in a different language than the query, degrading accuracy and recall. A practical solution is to synthesize in-language skills for retrieval but the quality can be unreliable, so relevance in this setting alone often surfaces a related but unusable candidate. To address this, we propose M-SQE, a post-retrieval Multilingual Skill Quality Estimation framework that scores candidates via a Theory view for intrinsic quality and an Action view for task-grounded utility, unified into a domain-conditioned final score. We evaluate M-SQE across three skill-use domains: general, tool-use, and cultural tasks. Empirically, we build three-layer candidate skill pools mirroring today's ecosystem, where M-SQE's task success exceeds existing baseline's average by at least +3.5 points across three different retrievers. Particularly, M-SQE lifts the lowest-resource languages most (+12.9pp on Hindi and +5.6pp on Swahili) and achieves strong performance across all six culture regions, thereby moving agentic skill use toward linguistic and cultural equality.

Computation and Language (cs.CL)

arXiv:2609.18445 [cs.CL]

(or arXiv:2609.18445v1 [cs.CL] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.18445 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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