cs.AIJul 6, 2026

MetaSkill-Evolve: Recursive Self-Improvement of LLM Agents via Two-Timescale Meta-Skill Evolution

Authors: Zefeng Wang, Minxi Yan, Jinhe Bi, Sikuan Yan, Volker Tresp, Yunpu Ma

Organizations: LMU Munich · The Chinese University of Hong Kong · MCML · MemAgents Lab

Abstract

Recent LLM agents tackle increasingly long-horizon, open-ended tasks, and external skills, reusable procedural knowledge supplied to the agent, further extend this capability. However, a fixed, hand-authored skill is rarely optimal, and cannot adapt to the diversity of tasks an agent encounters. Self-improving agents address this by rewriting their own skill files from execution traces, yielding meaningful gains on challenging benchmarks. Yet such self-evolution remains non-recursive: it improves only the task skill (what the agent does) while the improvement procedure (how it improves) is authored once and held fixed. We introduce MetaSkill-Evolve, a two-timescale framework that makes agentic skill improvement recursive: every branch carries both a task skill ss and a branch-local meta-skill m=(ψ,σ,α,π,ε)m=(ψ,σ,α,π,\varepsilon) whose five components parameterise the Analyzer, Retriever, Allocator, Proposer, and Evolver agents of the improvement pipeline. Task skills evolve on a fast loop while the meta-skill evolves on a slower one under the same pipeline applied to itself, with no additional model or objective. With all five pipeline agents sharing a single frozen backbone, MetaSkill-Evolve outperforms no-skill, static-skill, and single-level evolution baselines on three agentic benchmarks (OfficeQA, SealQA, ALFWorld), improving held-out test accuracy over the raw backbone by +23.54, +16.09, and +1.92 points respectively.

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