cs.AIOct 7, 2026

SkillForge: Co-Evolving Skills and Agents via Dynamic Skill Lifecycles

Authors: Yuyao Ge, Yiwei Wang, Yuchen He, Baolong Bi, Lingrui Mei, Jiayu Yao, Lizhe Chen, Shenghua Liu

Organizations: Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences · University of California, Merced · Tsinghua University

Abstract

Memory-augmented reinforcement learning strengthens LLM agents' ability to solve complex long-horizon tasks. Skills are one such form of memory, pairing instructions with an applicability condition over task types. However, retaining every skill indiscriminately as the policy improves lets obsolete or harmful entries accumulate and mislead the agent. We propose SkillForge, an agentic RL method that compiles and evolves the skill library through a fitness-driven skill lifecycle of trial, active, stable, and retired states, so that the skills and the model co-evolve throughout training. A pre-RL evaluation phase first uses the base model's own rollouts to pre-retire low-fitness skills, yielding a filtered library that then seeds supervised fine-tuning. Reinforcement learning takes over from this checkpoint, and at each iteration selective retirement, stabilization, and LLM-guided mutation continue to forge the skill library alongside policy optimization. Across multiple interactive agent benchmarks, SkillForge achieves the highest aggregate success rate, delivering up to 7.8% relative improvement over the strongest baseline while keeping the skill library compact throughout training. We introduce SkillFurnace, a dataset of 5k+ annotated records bundling retirement-filtered SFT trajectories, evolved skill libraries with fitness annotations, and retirement events with human-annotated failure categories to support research on skill quality and lifecycle management.

Explore similar work

CardsList
  1. Skill1: Unified Evolution of Skill-Augmented Agents via Reinforcement Learning

    May 7, 2026Yaorui Shi, Yuxin Chen, Zhengxi Lu +6SkillsAgentic Reinforcement Learning

  2. ReSkill: Reconciling Skill Creation with Policy Optimization in Agentic RL

    Jun 1, 2026Zelin He, Haotian Lin, Boran Han +6Agentic Reinforcement LearningSkills

  3. Skill-R1: Agent Skill Evolution via Reinforcement Learning

    May 10, 2026Yash Vishe, Rohan Surana, Xunyi Jiang +8Self-Evolving Skill LibrariesUnsupervised Skill Discovery