cs.AIMay 11, 2026

SkillEvolver: Skill Learning as a Meta-Skill

Authors: Genrui ZhangErle ZhuJinfeng ZhouCaiyan JiaHongning Wang

Organizations: 2Beijing Jiaotong University · 1Tsinghua University

Abstract

Agent skills today are static artifact: authored once -- by human curation or one-shot generation from parametric knowledge -- and then consumed unchanged, with no mechanism to improve from real use. We propose \textbf{SkillEvolver}, a lightweight, plug-and-play solution for online skill learning, in which a single meta-skill iteratively authors, deploys, and refines domain-specific skills. The learning target of SkillEvolver is the skill's prose and code, not model weights, so that the resulting artifact drops into any agent without retraining; and the meta-skill itself is just another skill, loaded through the same interface by any protocol-compliant CLI-agent. Unlike trace-distillation, the meta-skill refines only after deploying the learnt skill, such that the learning signal comes from failures another agent encounters while using it -- not from exploratory traces alone. Refinement iterations are governed by a fresh-agent overfit audit that catches possible leakage as well as deployed-skill-specific failures, including the silent-bypass mode in which a skill appears valid in content but is never invoked at runtime. On 8383 SkillsBench tasks spanning 15+15^{+} domains, SkillEvolver reaches 56.8%56.8\% accuracy versus 43.6%43.6\% for curated human skills and 29.9%29.9\% for the no-skill baseline; on three GPU kernel optimization tasks from KernelBench, it also raises mean speedup from 1.161.16 to 1.511.51 on average.

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