CoEvoSkills: Self-Evolving Agent Skills via Co-Evolutionary Verification
Authors: Hanrong Zhang, Shicheng Fan, Henry Peng Zou, Yankai Chen, Zhenting Wang, Jiayu Zhou, Chengze Li, Wei-Chieh Huang, Yifei Yao, Kening Zheng, Xue, Liu, Xiaoxiao Li, Philip S. Yu
Organizations: Steve · University of Illinois Chicago · MBZUAI · McGill University · Columbia University · Zhejiang University · University of British Columbia
Anthropic proposes the concept of skills for LLM agents to tackle multi-step professional tasks that simple tool invocations cannot address. A tool is a single, self-contained function, whereas a skill is a structured bundle of interdependent multi-file artifacts. Currently, skill generation is not only label-intensive due to manual authoring, but also may suffer from human--machine cognitive misalignment, which can lead to degraded agent performance, as evidenced by evaluations on SkillsBench. Therefore, we aim to enable agents to autonomously generate skills. However, existing self-evolving methods designed for tools cannot be directly applied to skills due to their increased complexity. To address these issues, we propose CoEvoSkills, a self-evolving skills framework that enables agents to autonomously construct complex, multi-file skill packages. Specifically, CoEvoSkills couples a Skill Generator that iteratively refines skills with a Surrogate Verifier that co-evolves to provide informative and actionable feedback without access to ground-truth test content. On SkillsBench, CoEvoSkills outperforms five baselines on both Claude Code and Codex, and generalizes strongly to six additional LLMs. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/Zhang-Henry/CoEvoSkills.
Figures & tables
Figure 1: Tool–skill difference illustration.
Figure 2: Skill quality improvement across 5 evolution rounds. CoEvoSkills surpasses human-curated skills within 5 evolution iterations.
Figure 3: Overview of the CoEvoSkills co-evolutionary framework. The Skill Generator and Surrogate Verifier co-evolve through iterative refinement. The verifier provides structured failure feedback to drive skill improvement, while a ground-truth oracle test returns only an opaque pass/fail signal, triggering test escalation and ensuring strict information isolation.
Figure 4: Skill quality comparisons with baselines on SkillsBench (Claude Opus 4.6 + Claude-Code). Error bars: ± 1 std over 5 runs.
Component
Setting
Backbones
Claude Opus 4.6, GPT-5.2
Surrogate verifier model
Same as evolution backbone (Claude Opus 4.6 / GPT-5.2)
Ground-truth oracle test agent
Claude-Code (Claude Opus 4.6) / Codex (GPT-5.2)
Evolution stage
K=5 Ground Truth Oracle rounds, M=15 surrogate repair retries
Table 1: Shared configuration for evolution and evaluation.
Model
Agent harness
Claude Opus 4.6
Claude-Code ( Anthropic, 2025a )
GPT-5.2
Codex ( OpenAI, 2025a )
Claude Sonnet 4.5
Claude-Code ( Anthropic, 2025a )
Claude Haiku 4.5
Terminus-2 ( Merrill et al., 2026 )
Qwen3 Coder
Terminus-2 ( Merrill et al., 2026 )
DeepSeek V3
Terminus-2 ( Merrill et al., 2026 )
Table 2: Agent harness used for each model in ground-truth oracle evaluation.
Figure 5: Cross-model skill transferability on SkillsBench. Skills evolved by Claude Opus 4.6 are transferred to six additional models spanning five providers. Each pair of bars shows the no-skill baseline (red) and the with-skills pass rate (blue). Delta annotations indicate absolute improvement. All models benefit substantially, with gains of approximately 35–44 percentage points across models, confirming that the evolved skills encode reusable task structure rather than model-specific artifacts.
Figure 6: Per-domain pass rates on SkillsBench. Three conditions are compared using Claude Opus 4.6: no-skill baseline, human-curated skills, and CoEvoSkills self-evolved skills, across 11 professional domains. Numbers in parentheses indicate task counts. Self-evolved skills outperform human-curated skills in 9 of 11 domains. The arrow highlights Natural Science, where human-curated skills degrade performance, whereas self-evolved skills yield substantial gains, evidencing human–machine cognitive misalignment.
Appendix figures & tables5 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
Setting
Pass rate (%)
Δ vs. Full
CoEvoSkills (Full framework)
71.1
—
W/O surrogate verifier
41.1
−30.0
W/O evolution (Context only)
42.4
−28.7
No-Skill Baseline
30.6
−40.5
Appendix
Table A1: Ablation results on SkillsBench, pass rate (%). Claude Opus 4.6 + Claude-Code. Ablation rows are single runs due to computational cost.
Figure B1: Distribution of verification cycles (left) and Ground Truth Oracle rounds (right) across 85 evolution tasks. Verification cycles include all host interventions ( Surrogate Verifier failures, Ground Truth Oracle evaluations). Ground Truth Oracle rounds count only the subset where the surrogate verifier passed and the oracle verifier was invoked. Failed tasks (red) cluster at higher iteration counts.
Round
Exit condition
Surrogate Verifier
Ground Truth Oracle
Key event
1
Verifier fail
0/15 (0%)
—
Initial skill has bugs
2
Checklist fail
15/15 (100%)
—
Progress checklist incomplete
3
Verifier pass
15/15 (100%)
3/4 (75%)
Period precision insufficient
4
Verifier pass
20/20 (100%)
3/4 (75%)
Precision fixed, alias check fails
5
Verifier fail
19/22 (86%)
—
Surrogate Verifier catches regression
6
Verifier pass
22/22 (100%)
4/4 (100%)
All tests pass
Appendix
Table C1: Evolution trace for the exoplanet transit detection skill. Each round records the trigger type, Surrogate Verifier outcome, Ground Truth Oracle outcome, and key event.
Ver.
Detrending
Algorithm
Precision strategy
Ground Truth Oracle
V1
Biweight
BLS
None
—
V2
Biweight (opt.)
BLS
None
75%
V3
Median filter
BLS
None
75%
V4
Savitzky-Golay
TLS
Two-stage + alias
100%
Appendix
Table C2: Skill versions for the exoplanet transit detection task. Each row records the detrending method, search algorithm, precision strategy, and Ground Truth Oracle outcome.
Aspect
Human-curated (5 skills)
Self-evolved (1 skill)
Total size
1,096 lines across 5 SKILL.md
64 lines SKILL.md + 142 lines Python
Executable code
None (documentation only)
9 callable functions
Algorithm guidance
Lists BLS, TLS, Lomb-Scargle equally
Prescribes TLS with justification
Period refinement
2-line tip: “refine candidates”
Two-stage search: broad then ± 2% narrow
Alias detection
“Check for aliasing” (1 sentence)
Function testing P , 2P , P/2 automatically
Precision handling
Not addressed
Enforces 5-decimal output formatting
Appendix
Table C3: Structural comparison between human-curated and self-evolved skills for the exoplanet transit detection task.
We introduce Skills-Coach, a novel automated framework designed to significantly enhance the self-evolution of skills within Large Language Model (LLM)-based agents. Addressing the current fragmentation of the skill ecosystem, Skills-Coach explores the boundaries of skill capabilities, thereby facilitating the comprehensive competency coverage essential for intelligent applications. The framework comprises four core modules: a Diverse Task Generation Module that systematically creates a comprehensive test suite for various skills; a Lightweight Optimization Module dedicated to optimizing skill prompts and their corresponding code; a Comparative Execution Module facilitating the execution and evaluation of both original and optimized skills; and a Traceable Evaluation Module, which rigorously evaluates performance against specified criteria. Skills-Coach offers flexible execution options through its virtual and real modes. To validate its efficacy, we introduce Skill-X, a comprehensive benchmark dataset consisting of 48 diverse skills. Experimental results demonstrate that Skills-Coach achieves significant performance improvements in skill capability across a wide range of categories, highlighting its potential to advance the development of more robust and adaptable LLM-based agents.
Yu Tian, Jiawei Chen, Lifan Zheng +5
University of Chinese Academy of Sciences · 2East China Normal University · 3Zhongguancun Academy +3
LLM training is shifting from manual design and annotation to interaction-driven self-evolution. However, existing self-evolutionary methods face a fundamental dilemma between task diversity and verification reliability: environment-bound methods obtain precise feedback but confine learning to narrow domains, while open-ended self-generation broadens the task space but lacks reliable verification, allowing misleading rewards to pollute the training loop. We identify agent skills as a powerful middle ground to reconcile this tension: each skill ensures deep, verifiable execution in a specific scenario, while dynamic routing across skills maintains open-ended task variety. Leveraging this insight, we introduce Skill Self-Play (Skill-SP), a co-evolutionary framework comprising a proposer, a solver, and a dynamic skill controller. Orchestrated via a reinforcement learning loop, these components co-evolve in a continuous self-play loop: the proposer generates challenging tasks conditioned on dynamically sampled skills; the solver explores candidate solutions to push its capability boundaries; and the skill controller collects execution feedback to update and expand the skill library. This interactive co-evolution effectively bridges the gap between structured verification and open-ended exploration. Empirical evaluations on tool-use and reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that Skill-SP, serving as a robust evolution engine, consistently pushes the performance ceiling of competent backbones while catalyzing striking turnarounds for initially misaligned models. Our code is available at https://github.com/Qwen-Applications/skill-self-play.
Siyuan Huang, Pengyu Cheng, Haotian Liu +10
Qwen Large Model Application Team, Alibaba · The Chinese University of Hong Kong · Renmin University of China +5
Large language model (LLM) agents rely on reusable skills to solve complex tasks, but existing skill creation approaches often treat skills as isolated, static artifacts, limiting reusability, reliability, and long-term improvement. We propose MUSE-Autoskill Agent (Memory-Utilizing Skill Evolution), a skill-centric agent framework that creates, reuses, and refines skills under a unified lifecycle: creation, memory, management, evaluation, and refinement. MUSE creates skills on demand, stores them across tasks, retrieves them through a skill catalog, and accumulates per-skill experience for later reuse and adaptation. Across the main reported settings on SkillsBench and SkillLearnBench, MUSE-Autoskill outperforms Hermes, Codex, and Claude Code. On SkillsBench, its self-created skills surpass human-authored skills on the successfully covered subset (85.24% vs. 81.17%), showing that lifecycle-managed skills can distill agent experience into highly effective reusable assets; MUSE-created skills also transfer to Hermes more effectively than Codex- or Claude-created skills, reaching 51.90% accuracy under transfer. These results highlight the importance of treating skills as long-lived, experience-aware, and testable assets.