SkillFuzz: Fuzzing Skill Composition for Implicit Intents Discovery in Open Skill Marketplaces
2026-07-02 • Software Engineering
Software EngineeringArtificial IntelligenceComputation and Language
AI summaryⓘ
The authors study how combining different language model skills, which are instructions for software tasks, can cause unintended side effects called implicit intents. They point out that checking skills one by one misses these hidden problems because issues only appear when skills interact. To solve this, the authors treat finding implicit intents like testing many skill combinations without running them fully, using a special search guided by skill rules. Their method, skillfuzz, efficiently finds many problematic skill combos and flags high-risk interactions accurately, improving safety in skill marketplaces.
Large Language Modelsskillsimplicit intentsskill marketplacesskill compositionfuzzingMonte Carlo Tree Searchexecution-free testingsoftware engineering automationplanning artifacts
Authors
Jinwei Hu, Yi Dong, Youcheng Sun, Xiaowei Huang
Abstract
Large Language Model (LLM)-based agents increasingly automate software engineering tasks through reusable skills, natural-language instruction documents that guide planning and execution. Open skill marketplaces enable users to assemble agents by co-activating community-contributed skills, but marketplace operators typically audit skills in isolation. As a result, individually benign skills may interact to redirect an agent toward unintended objectives, which we term implicit intents. Detecting such intents is challenging because the effect emerges only through skill composition, execution environments are often unavailable at admission time, and the space of possible co-activations grows exponentially with marketplace size. In this paper, we formulate implicit-intent discovery as a fuzzing problem over skill compositions, where skill compositions are the unit under test, planning artifacts expose agent intent before execution, and deviations from a skill-free baseline serve as a differential oracle. Based on this formulation, we propose skillfuzz, the first execution-free testing approach that extracts structured skill contracts and uses contract-guided Monte Carlo Tree Search to prioritize potentially conflicting compositions. Across representative skill-marketplace workloads, skillfuzz discovers over 1,000 distinct implicit intents under a fixed query budget, confirms more than 80% of the highest-risk flagged compositions during execution-time validation, and identifies substantially more high-severity implicit intents than alternative search strategies while exploring only a fraction of the pairwise interaction space they require.