Selm: Self-Evolving Library Management for Multi-Skill Agent Optimization
Organizations: School of Information, Renmin University of China, Beijing, China · Key Laboratory of Data Engineering and Knowledge Engineering, Beijing, China · Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence, Beijing, China · Beijing Key Laboratory of Intelligent Database Systems and Applications, Beijing, China ·
Abstract
Large language model (LLM) agents increasingly use skills as a lightweight way to acquire task-specific knowledge. Recent work enables skills to evolve from task trajectories. However, these methods often lack systematic management of evolved skills, making it difficult for agents to reuse and accumulate skills across domains, thus limiting performance on subsequent tasks.To reliably accumulate, reuse, and maintain useful skills across tasks, we present SELM (Self-Evolving Library Management), a framework that formulates skill evolution as library-level management. SELM jointly manages skill retrieval, updating, and lifecycle by maintaining skill confidence and utility signals. It introduces utility-aware retrieval to select useful skills, a Map-Reduce framework to generate targeted updates from task-specific experience, and lifecycle controls to retain or remove skills based on their effectiveness. These mechanisms enable the skill library to continuously accumulate useful experience while preserving and pruning skills across tasks, improving agent performance on complex tasks across diverse domains. We evaluate SELM on four agent benchmarks covering diverse tasks and execution environments, and SELM consistently outperforms in most settings.
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Appendix
| Hyperparameter | Description | Default |
| Maximum library capacity | 30 | |
| Utility weight in retrieval scoring | 0.6 | |
| soft score weight in reward calculating | 0.5 | |
| EMA decay factor for utility update | 0.4 | |
| Soft threshold for success classification | 0.3 | |
| Maximum graveyard capacity | 50 |
LLM Agent Skill Learning
Large language model agent skill learning studies how agents acquire, represent, reuse, and refine procedures for multi-step tasks.
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