LLM agents can evolve by learning from accumulated experience. Existing approaches extract reusable external knowledge, such as skills and memories, from experience to guide subsequent task solving, with some further internalizing this knowledge through model training. However, different ways of analyzing and transforming the same experience can yield knowledge with substantially different utility, even when the resulting guidance appears reasonable. Inspired by consistency regularization, we identify consistent utility gains across different ways of analyzing the same experience, rather than relying on any single way of analyzing it. We introduce SPLICE, a framework for consistency-regularized knowledge-model co-evolution. It constructs evolution views by perturbing how the same experience is analyzed, producing different knowledge candidates. Knowledge updates are then guided by common gain, which accounts for utility gains and their consistency across views. During model evolution, self-distillation internalizes the evolved knowledge alongside reinforcement learning, using knowledge associated with consistent utility degradation as a contrastive reference. The two processes interleave, with model updates driving further knowledge evolution. Experiments across diverse domains show that SPLICE outperforms knowledge evolution and model training baselines by up to 7.1 and 4.6 points in average accuracy, while its evolved knowledge reduces output tokens per correct solution by up to 44% and transfers across model sizes and families.
Figures & tables
Figure 1: From prediction consistency to utility consistency. Left: Consistency regularization encourages consistent predictions under parameter perturbations. Right: SPLICE guides knowledge updates using utility gains that persist across different evolution views of the same experience.
Figure 2: Overview of SPLICE . Left: Knowledge evolution perturbs how the same experience is analyzed and transformed, using common gain across evolution views to select task experience for knowledge updates. Right: Model evolution combines GRPO with gated contrastive self-distillation to internalize the evolved knowledge, using noisy knowledge as a contrastive reference.
Method
LiveMath
LiveCode
SpreadSheet
WebShop
Avg.
Δ
Qwen3.5-4B
Base
27.59
38.89
11.43
3.60
20.38
—
ReasoningBank
37.97
34.31
12.26
18.93
25.87
+5.5
ACE
48.01
31.81
16.31
27.67
30.95
+10.6
EvoSkill
45.70
40.83
14.17
44.33
36.26
+15.9
SkillOpt
47.46
39.31
17.38
42.60
36.69
+16.3
Table 1: Main results (Acc., %; ↑ ). For each model size, the upper group contains training-free methods, whose results are averaged over three seeds, and the lower group contains methods that involve model training. Avg. is computed over all four benchmarks, and Δ shows improvement in Avg. over Base. Bold and underline mark the best and second-best results for each model size.
Model
Metric
Mean gain
Common gain
Qwen3.5-4B
Test Acc. (%)
44.40
58.20
Gain ≥ 0 (%)
28.57
67.86
Qwen3.5-9B
Test Acc. (%)
53.60
59.67
Gain ≥ 0 (%)
28.57
69.05
Table 2: Common gain versus mean gain on WebShop. Mean gain scores task evidence by the average utility gain across evolution views. Gain ≥ 0 is the percentage of rounds in which validation Acc. is not degraded.
Figure 3: Validation performance and degradation risk on WebShop. Left: validation Acc. of the proposed update across evolution rounds, before acceptance. Right: percentage of rounds in which the proposed update causes an absolute validation Acc. drop larger than a given threshold (in points).
Figure 4: Different strategies of using multiple evolution views on SpreadSheet and WebShop. Best branch adopts the candidate with the highest mean replay reward, and Merge-all updates knowledge with the evidence from all tasks. SPLICE (Know. Evo) achieves the best performance in all settings.
Figure 5: Knowledge length, output tokens, and interaction steps on WebShop. Results of SPLICE (Know. Evo) and knowledge evolution baselines with Qwen3.5-4B and Qwen3.5-9B. ReasoningBank uses a dynamic knowledge bank, so its knowledge length is omitted.
Figure 6: Generalization across model sizes and families. Knowledge evolved with Qwen3.5-9B is applied to other task models without further evolution. Bars show absolute gains in avg@8 Test Acc. (in points) over the same model without knowledge; error bars show paired 95% confidence intervals.
Figure 7: Model and knowledge contributions on LiveMath. Test Acc. of base and trained models evaluated without knowledge, with the knowledge at the start of training (Early K ), and with the final knowledge (Final K ).
Appendix figures & tables5 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
Benchmark
Train
Val.
Test
Output tokens
Epochs
LiveMath
86
43
302
16,384
3
LiveCode
68
34
240
32,768
3
SpreadSheet
80
40
280
4,096
3
WebShop
1,000
100
500
512
1
Appendix
Table 4: Data splits and training settings. Counts refer to tasks, or shopping sessions for WebShop. Output tokens are the maximum number of tokens per model response.
Component
Hyperparameter
Value
Knowledge evolution
Evolution views N
3
Replay runs per candidate
1
Selected tasks n
{1,2,3}
Model evolution
Self-distillation weight λ
{0.1,0.3,0.5,1}
Learning rate
1×10−6
Training batch size
8
Appendix
Table 5: Hyperparameters of SPLICE .
Figure 8: Validation gains of proposed updates on WebShop. Validation Acc. of the proposed update minus that of the current knowledge (in points) at each evolution round, including rejected updates. Insets show the mean absolute change.
Figure 9: Error correction and success preservation on WebShop. Percentages of tasks failed under the current knowledge that a proposed update solves, and of solved tasks that remain solved. Small points denote proposed updates in the first 30 rounds; large markers show pooled rates.
Figure 10: Training dynamics and knowledge use on LiveMath. Left: validation Acc. over optimizer update steps without knowledge and with the latest knowledge, which is adopted (filled) or rejected (open) by validation with the current model. Right: the same knowledge helps the 4B model at update step 44, but leads to an error at update step 56 when the model already answers correctly without it; the 9B model uses a check learned from execution feedback to correct an unsupported convergence claim, and the knowledge is accepted for subsequent training.
Agent skills package specialized knowledge and workflows into reusable resources that extend AI agent capabilities. Recent work automatically discovers such skills from agent experience, which enables agents to progressively adapt through interaction. However, the insights that guide skill development typically remain scattered across optimization histories, limiting their systematic reuse across iterations. We introduce WikiSkill, a framework that co-evolves agent skills with a persistent knowledge base (wiki). At a high level, WikiSkill separates raw execution experience, accumulated knowledge, and executable skills, while continuously consolidating experience into the wiki, which subsequent skill updates can build on. Across diverse benchmarks and models, WikiSkill consistently outperforms state-of-the-art skill-evolution methods and improves over no-skill baselines in most model-benchmark settings. We find that skill evolution complements model scaling: larger models generally benefit more from evolved skills, while smaller models with skills can outperform substantially larger models without them. We also find that evolved skills transfer effectively across models and model families, and skills evolved by other models can outperform self-evolved skills. Finally, our ablation studies confirm that persistent knowledge accumulation in the wiki is critical for effective skill evolution. These results demonstrate the benefits of systematically accumulating and refining agent experience for developing reusable and transferable skills.
Natural-language skills are textual procedural memories through which large language model (LLM) agents retain reusable task knowledge without updating model weights. Existing methods typically treat skills as either static artifacts or monolithic documents optimized using aggregate validation scores as feedback. However, representing a skill as a monolithic document restricts optimization to its textual content, without explicitly modeling the structure through which procedural knowledge is retrieved and executed. We identify a key distinction between learning what knowledge to retain and determining how to organize it: textual updates should first be validated through execution evidence, after which the retained knowledge should be structured according to its procedural dependencies and retrieval requirements. To this end, we introduce SkillSpec, a two-phase framework comprising consensus-gated evolution and representation specialization. In the consensus-gated phase, complementary editing intents generate complete candidate skills. An update is committed only when paired evaluations reach consensus, requiring sufficient overall improvement and non-negative aggregate paired gain in every repeated evaluation. In the specialization phase, signals of process and redundancy sensitivity derived from the full optimization trajectory, including accepted and rejected candidates, guide the selection of a flat, graph, or hybrid representation.Across six benchmarks and three target language models, SkillSpec improves average success rate over SkillOpt by 6.89%, averaged across the three models. These results demonstrate that reliable skill evolution and representation specialization address complementary objectives: deciding what knowledge to retain and how to structure it for inference.
Large language model (LLM) agents can continually improve without parameter updates by converting historical experience into reusable procedural knowledge. However, existing methods often consolidate experience based on semantic similarity or LLM judgments, which may merge superficially related but behaviorally incompatible strategies and thereby degrade performance. To address the issue, we propose SkillCommit, an online skill evolution framework that continuously transforms experience into a hierarchical library of reusable skills. Rather than generalizing from individual experiences immediately, SkillCommit first preserves each experience as an instance-specific patch, retaining its locally validated behavior. As patches accumulate, SkillCommit abstracts those sharing a common behavioral mechanism into higher-level skills. Specifically, for each incoming skill, embedding-based retrieval first identifies candidate related skills. Cross-instance replay and an LLM-based mechanism check determine whether these skills transfer across cases and share a common underlying mechanism. Candidates that pass both checks are abstracted into a higher-level skill and committed only if it preserves the validated behavior of all constituent skills. Experiments on RuleArena, OpenExempt and KOR-Bench demonstrate that SkillCommit consistently improves agent performance across diverse domains. Moreover, the learned skills transfer across model scales and families, enabling cross-model experience transfer.
Yu He, Weikai Yang
Nanjing University · The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou)