LLM Agent Skill Learning

LLM: Large Language Model

Follow this topic Ask about this topic

Momentum

45 papers in the last four weeks, up 114% on the four weeks before. 0.4% of all new papers.

Jul 13Week of Sep 28

Latest papers 271

May 31, 2026cs.CL

SkillAdaptor: Self-Adapting Skills for LLM Agents from Trajectories

Large language model (LLM) agents increasingly rely on reusable external skills to solve long-horizon interactive tasks. Existing training-free skill adaptation pipelines usually update skills from full trajectories or session-level feedback, which makes failure attribution coarse and often produces unstable or overly broad revisions. We propose SkillAdaptor, a training-free step-level skill adaptation framework with explicit failure attribution, and it can plug into OpenClaw-class agent harnesses. Given a failed trajectory, SkillAdaptor identifies a first actionable fault step, links responsibility to candidate skills, and applies targeted updates under explicit acceptance checks while keeping the backbone frozen. We evaluate on WebShop, PinchBench, and Claw-Eval with Kimi-K2.5, GLM-5, and GPT-5.2. SkillAdaptor improves over no-skill and skill-adaptation baselines on all three suites, with the largest single-metric improvements of +1.5 points on PinchBench Avg Score%, +1.8 on Claw-Eval Avg Score, and +1.7 on WebShop success rate. These results indicate that step-level attribution supports more stable and auditable training-free skill maintenance\footnote{The code will be released at https://github.com/zjunlp/SkillAdaptor.}.

Zhuoyun Yu, Xin Xie, Wuguannan Yao +4

♠Zhejiang University · ♣Ant Digital Technologies, Ant Group · ♢Zhejiang University - Ant Group Joint Laboratory of Knowledge Graph +1

LLM Agent Skill Learning Long-Horizon LLM Agents

May 31, 2026cs.AI

ANDES: Agent Native Data Evolving Synthesis Tool for Autonomous Instruction Alignment

AI agents are increasingly being tasked with automating AI research itself, particularly the critical post-training phase that transforms base LLMs into aligned assistants. However, recent evaluations reveal that even frontier agents struggle to perform this task. While the success of post-training fundamentally relies on acquiring high-quality data, relying on agents to autonomously curate targeted training datasets from the open web introduces severe challenges. Executing the long-horizon tasks of searching, filtering, and balancing data within noisy web environments frequently overwhelms an agent's limited context, ultimately leading to degraded dataset quality and suboptimal downstream training performance. To bridge this gap, we introduce Andes (Agent Native Data Evolving Synthesis), a framework that reimagines data generation as a plug-and-play \emph{agent skill}. Rather than forcing agents to devise complex data-gathering strategies from scratch, \textsc{Andes} provides an intelligent abstraction layer. By leveraging a self-evolving World Tree routing mechanism and actionable diagnostic reports, it allows trainer agents to dynamically steer data synthesis through an interactive, closed-loop interface. We demonstrate that under strict compute constraints, equipping foundationally weaker agents with Andes improves automated alignment, securing state-of-the-art performance on PostTrainBench and robust cross-task generalization. Our project is available at https://github.com/zzy1127/ANDES.

Zhengyang Zhao, Shengjie Ye, Lu Ma +3

Peking University · Sichuan University, Chengdu

LLM Alignment LLM Agent Skill Learning Synthetic Data Generation for Language Models LLM Post-Training Autonomous Research Agents

May 31, 2026cs.AI

"Skill Issues'': Data-Centric Optimization of Lakehouse Agents

Coding agents are becoming users of data infrastructure, but their success depends not only on model quality: it also depends on the skills and environment files that teach agents how to use a system. We study how to optimize these artifacts for agents operating on a branching lakehouse, Bauplan. In our setting, headless APIs and Git-like data primitives expose data workflows through code, branches, commits, and merges. Our central observation is that a branching lakehouse turns data-agent evaluation from an output-matching problem into a state-verification problem: agent-generated pipeline code induces concrete, inspectable lakehouse changes. We present a data-centric optimization pipeline that generates task-verifier pairs, executes candidate skills in isolated sandboxes, and scores trajectories using both trace-level signals and programmatic checks over lakehouse state. In a preliminary evaluation on hundreds of tasks, optimized skills improve held-out reward by up to 28.6%. These results suggest that write-path data workflows provide a useful substrate for optimizing agent skills beyond read-only tasks.

Nicole Rose Schneider, Davide Ghilardi, Giacomo Piccinini +1

University of Maryland USA · Università Milano Bicocca Italy · Bauplan Labs USA

AI Coding Agents LLM Agent Skill Learning

May 31, 2026cs.AI

SkillRevise: Improving LLM-Authored Agent Skills via Trace-Conditioned Skill Revision

Agent skills are procedural artifacts that enable LLM agents to execute workflows, verify constraints, and recover from failures. Existing self-evolving methods refine skills using accumulated trajectories. However, they struggle in cold-start settings, where only an initial, imperfect skill is available. Consequently, skill construction defaults to expert authoring or one-shot LLM generation. Expert-authored skills are costly and may not align with how LLM agents actually execute tasks, while one-shot generated skills can be syntactically well formed yet behaviorally weak. To bridge this gap, we propose SkillRevise, an execution-grounded framework designed to iteratively refine these initial skills. SkillRevise diagnoses skill defects from execution evidence, retrieves relevant repair principles from a general memory, and applies execution-anchored edits. By re-executing candidates, it retains the first verifier-passing skill within the revision budget and falls back to empirical utility only when no candidate succeeds. Evaluated across three benchmarks and five LLMs, SkillRevise substantially outperforms one-shot baselines, improving the base agent's success rate on SkillsBench from 36.05% to 61.63%. Furthermore, the revised skills transfer across both executors and task environments, suggesting that SkillRevise captures reusable procedural knowledge beyond any single executor.

Yuxuan Liu, Zhaochen Su, Lingyun Xie +11

The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology · Harbin Institute of Technology · Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen +2

LLM Agent Self-Improvement LLM Agent Skill Learning LLM Agent Skill Retrieval

May 30, 2026cs.CL

Skill or Skip? Learning Selective Skill Invocation in Agentic Tasks via Dual-Granularity Preference Learning

Agent skills are callable procedural modules that provide reusable knowledge and execution policies for complex agentic tasks. However, existing methods mainly focus on selecting relevant skills or improving the skills themselves, while overlooking whether a relevant skill should actually be invoked at the current decision point. Unhelpful invocations may introduce irrelevant context and disrupt an otherwise correct execution process. To address this issue, we propose SelSkill, a dual-granularity preference-learning framework for selective skill invocation. SelSkill formulates skill use as a skill-or-skip decision, uses predictive uncertainty to prioritize candidate decision points, and constructs controlled invoke-skip preference pairs from shared trajectory prefixes. It further combines episode-level outcome preferences with step-level invocation preferences to capture both overall trajectory quality and the local effectiveness of skill invocation. On ALFWorld with Qwen3-8B, SelSkill improves task success by 10.9 points over the skill-enabled baseline and 7.8 over No-Skill, with 29.1-point higher execution precision. On BFCL, task success and execution precision improve by 5.7 and 29.5 points, respectively. Zero-shot results on Tau-bench and PopQA suggest partial transfer to unseen domains and skills.

Chishui Chen, Jiaye Lin, Te Sun +6

Meituan · Shanghai Jiao Tong University · Nanjing University +2

LLM Agent Skill Learning Tool-Using Agents Preference Learning

May 29, 2026cs.LG

Skill Reuse as Compression in Agentic RL

Large language model agents trained with reinforcement learning (RL) often learn brittle, task-specific shortcuts. We hypothesize that agents generalize better when their successful trajectories are structurally compressible, decomposed into a small set of reusable abstract patterns. To formalize this, we introduce ReuseRL, which grounds agentic RL in the Minimum Description Length (MDL) principle. ReuseRL extracts a shared skill dictionary from successful trajectories and augments the RL objective with a segmentation cost, explicitly penalizing idiosyncratic behaviors that encode poorly. We prove a PAC-Bayes bound guaranteeing that a dictionary extracted from successful trajectories has bounded expected description length on future successful behavior. Across ALFWorld, TextWorld-Cooking, and Countdown-Stepwise, ReuseRL improves in- and out-of-distribution success over vanilla GRPO and strong round-length baselines.

Zhikun Xu, Yu Feng, Jacob Dineen +3

Arizona State University · University of Pennsylvania · University of Southern California

Agentic RL Minimum Description Length LLM Agent Skill Learning Agent Skill Learning Policy Learning Generalization in RL+1

May 29, 2026cs.CL

Skill Availability and Presentation Granularity in Large-Language-Model Agents: A Controlled SkillsBench Study

Skill documents provide procedural knowledge to large-language-model agents at inference time. This article studies whether the presentation granularity of controlled skill knowledge changes downstream task success. The experiment uses a pinned SkillsBench version, a 30-task domain-balanced subset validated by official oracle runs, two reasoning-enabled model configurations, six skill conditions, and five trials per task-condition-model cell. Skill availability is the clearest empirical signal. Relative to no skill, skill conditions increase task-mean pass rate by 26.7 to 36.0 percentage points for GPT-5.5 and by 18.0 to 26.0 percentage points for DeepSeek V4-Flash. The final data contain 1,800 rows, with 900 rows for each model. The task is the inference unit. Five trials are aggregated within each task-condition-model cell before paired contrasts are estimated over 30 tasks. The primary presentation contrasts are smaller and uncertain. Low-abstraction guidance differs from high-abstraction guidance by +0.7 percentage points for GPT-5.5 and -6.7 percentage points for DeepSeek V4-Flash, with both 95% bootstrap confidence intervals crossing zero. Adding one worked example to medium-abstraction guidance differs from the no-example variant by +0.7 and +1.3 percentage points. Mean-reward robustness checks preserve the same substantive conclusion. In this controlled subset, skill availability is associated with higher success than no skill, while the tested presentation-granularity changes yield small, uncertain, and model-dependent effects.

Xiaonan Xu, Wenjing Wu

Computer Information Technology, Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff, AZ, USA · Computer Science, University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, CO, USA

LLM Agent Evaluation LLM Agent Skill Learning AI Agent Benchmarks LLM Agents

May 29, 2026cs.AI

COLLEAGUE.SKILL: Automated AI Skill Generation via Expert Knowledge Distillation

LLM agents are increasingly expected not only to complete isolated tasks, but also to carry bounded representations of human expertise, judgment, and interaction style. Building such person-grounded agents remains difficult because actionable knowledge associated with a person or role is usually embedded in heterogeneous traces rather than written as clean instructions. Existing memory and persona systems capture fragments of this evidence, while skill frameworks provide portable packaging formats; however, there is no end-to-end workflow for distilling these traces into inspectable, correctable, and agent-usable skills. We present an automated trace-to-skill distillation system for generating person-grounded AI skills via expert knowledge distillation. Given materials from a target person or role, COLLEAGUE.SKILL produces a versioned skill package with two coordinated tracks: a capability track for practices, mental models, and decision heuristics, and a bounded behavior track for communication style, interaction rules, and correction history. The package can be inspected, invoked, updated through natural-language feedback, rolled back, installed across agent hosts, and optionally prepared for controlled distribution. We describe the artifact contract, generation workflow, correction lifecycle, deployment surface, and domain presets implemented in the open-source system. At the time of writing, the public repository has approximately 18.5k GitHub stars; the gallery lists 215 skills from 165 contributors and more than 100k cumulative stars across listed skill cards. The system illustrates how person-grounded skills can be represented as portable, correctable packages rather than opaque prompts or hidden memories.

Tianyi Zhou, Dongrui Liu, Leitao Yuan +2

Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory

LLM Agent Skill Learning Persona-Conditioned Generation Knowledge Distillation Personal AI Agents

May 29, 2026cs.CL

Skill is Not One-Size-Fits-All: Model-Aware Skill Alignment for LLM Agents

LLM agents increasingly retrieve externally curated skills-procedural instructions retrieved at decision time-to improve performance on long-horizon interactive tasks. Existing skill libraries are typically treated as model-agnostic, reusing the same skill formulations across backbones with substantially different capacities and behaviors. However, our controlled experiments across multiple model scales show that skill effectiveness is strongly model-dependent: a skill that benefits one backbone can harm another. Motivated by this observation, we propose MASA Model-Aware Skill Alignment, a framework that adapts skills to each target backbone without modifying agent weights. MASA operates in two stages: (1) a hierarchical skill evolution pipeline that iteratively rewrites general and task-specific skills using hill climbing and UCB-driven tree search, guided by environment feedback and model capability profiles; and (2) a lightweight model-conditioned skill rewriter trained on evolution trajectories to reproduce the adaptation in a single forward pass. Experiments across three interactive environments and four backbones show that MASA consistently achieves the best overall performance, with gains of up to 25.8 points over the strongest baseline. The learned rewriter further generalizes to unseen tasks and environments without additional search, consistently outperforming a much larger teacher LLM at a fraction of the inference cost.

Jianxiang Yu, Jiapeng Zhu, Bochen Lin +3

East China Normal University, Shanghai, China

LLM Agent Skill Learning LLM Agent Skill Retrieval LLM Agents Long-Horizon LLM Agents

May 29, 2026cs.CL

ExpGraph: Model-Agnostic Experience Learning with Graph-Structured Memory for LLM Agents

Large language model (LLM) agents have shown strong capabilities in reasoning, tool use, and multi-step interaction, but they often solve tasks from scratch and fail to reuse successful strategies or failure lessons from prior experience. Fine-tuning on collected experience can improve reuse, but it is inflexible when stronger or more suitable executors emerge. We propose ExpGraph, a model-agnostic experience learning framework that enables frozen and replaceable LLM executors to improve through external experience reuse without parameter updates. ExpGraph summarizes historical trajectories into reusable skills and failure lessons, organizes them as nodes in a self-evolving experience graph, and retrieves useful experiences through graph diffusion and utility-aware ranking. A lightweight retrieval copilot is trained with reinforcement learning using feedback that compares executor performance with and without retrieved experiences, while the graph is updated online from downstream task outcomes. We evaluate ExpGraph on ExpSuite, covering question answering, mathematical reasoning, code generation, and multi-step agentic environments including ALFWorld and AppWorld. ExpGraph improves over the strongest baseline by 12.2% and 4.7% on static tasks with smaller and larger executors, and by 21.4% and 12.7% in agentic environments, while reducing average interaction steps by 12.7% and 21.6%. Ablations show that graph-structured experience, utility-aware ranking, and adaptive retrieval jointly enable effective experience reuse across diverse tasks and executor models.

Tao Feng, Chongrui Ye, Tianyang Luo +8

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign · 2Nanyang Technological University · 3Meta Monetization AI

Continual Learning for LLM Agents LLM Agent Skill Learning Graph-Based Agent Memory Memory-Augmented Language Model Agents

May 28, 2026cs.AI

Syll: Open-Source Personal Automation with Cross-Surface Execution

Personal AI agents must increasingly operate across APIs, shells, web surfaces, and desktop GUIs, yet many systems remain tuned to a single interface and offer limited support for user teaching and auditability. We present Syll, an open-source, self-hosted multimodal agent harness that unifies MCP/API tools, CLI execution, and visual GUI control in a modular runtime, enabling agents to coordinate computer use across heterogeneous interfaces while streamlining how users and agents exchange information. At the core of Syll is a bidirectional user-agent interaction layer: users teach procedures through direct demonstration, which Syll compiles into reusable skills; agent execution is translated back into multimodal evidence -- logs, keyframes, and approval checkpoints -- for inspection and control. Syll further externalizes memory, skills, routines, and governance as editable local artifacts, supporting straightforward inspection, extension, and downstream development. Our implementation has been validated on production desktop applications including Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Audition, Stardew Valley, macOS Finder and others. We report mechanism-oriented studies that validate multimodal routing, teachable GUI replay, and persistent local artifacts. We hope Syll can serve as a practical open-source foundation for personal automation that users can teach, inspect, and continuously extend.

Bo Zhang, Borui Zhang, Chenghao Jiang +5

Tsinghua University · GigaAI

LLM Agent Skill Learning Human-in-the-Loop AI AI Agent Monitoring Multimodal Tool Use Personal AI Agents

May 28, 2026cs.AI

OptSkills: Learning Generalizable Optimization Skills from Problem Archetypes via Cluster-Based Distillation

Leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) to automatically formulate and solve optimization problems from natural language has emerged as an efficient paradigm for automated optimization. However, existing methods still exhibit limited generalization: they are sensitive to superficial narrative variations, reuse experience mainly at the case level, and struggle to adapt to shifted or emerging problem types. We propose OptSkills, an archetype-centric skill learning and reasoning agent system for optimization modeling and solving. To improve robust generalization, our system clusters problems by their underlying archetypes rather than surface narratives. To improve in-distribution generalization, it explores diverse modeling paradigms and solver configurations within each cluster, then distills successful trajectories into reusable workflow-level skills. To improve out-of-distribution generalization, it refines existing skills or expands the skill library using newly obtained trajectories. Our system achieves a state-of-the-art micro-averaged accuracy of 68.27% on datasets encompassing diverse problem types and scenarios. In addition, on MIPLIB-NL, a highly challenging large-scale and high-dimensional benchmark, it achieves 26.91% accuracy, outperforming DeepSeek-V3.2-Thinking by 4.53%. After skill learning on Nano-CO, it reaches 72.79% on the OOD NLCO benchmark. Code and skills are available at https://github.com/fujiwaranoM0kou/OptSkills.

Haochen Yang, Ke Zhao, Mengyuan Ma +3

Shanghai Institute of AI for Education and School of Computer Science and Technology, East China Normal University, Shanghai, China · Ant Group, Hangzhou, China · Key Laboratory of Mathematics and Engineering Applications (MoE) and School of Mathematical Sciences, East China Normal University, Shanghai, China +2

Large Language Model-Guided Optimization OOD Generalization LLM Agent Skill Learning Natural Language to Optimization Modeling

May 28, 2026cs.AI

SkillsInjector: Dynamic Skill Context Construction for LLM Agents

LLM agents now draw on growing skill libraries to handle complex tasks. However, injecting more skills does not always improve task completion and can even degrade it. Existing methods still treat skill injection as a static step, selecting skills with fixed criteria, fixing the budget in advance, and leaving descriptions unchanged. We argue that this static treatment can undermine the utility of skills, because which skills are exposed, how many are included, and how they are presented all affect downstream performance. We propose SkillsInjector, a two-stage adaptive method that jointly addresses these decisions. First, a context planner learns execution-grounded skill preferences and admits an adaptive number of skills for each task. A set-aware renderer then tailors how selected descriptions are presented relative to their co-injected neighbors. Across tau2-bench, SkillsBench, and ALFWorld, SkillsInjector achieves the highest score, improving over the strongest baseline by 3.9, 6.1, and 7.3 percentage points, respectively. Ablation studies show that skill selection, adaptive budgeting, and set-aware rendering each contribute to the gain. These results show that skill-augmented agents benefit from optimizing the injected context itself. Code will be released upon publication

Yanchao Li, Wanhao Liu, Ben Gao +5

1Nanjing University · 2Shanghai AI Lab

Tool-Augmented Language Model Agents LLM Agent Skill Learning LLM Agent Skill Retrieval LLM Agents Tool-Using Language Agents

May 28, 2026cs.AI

GRASP: Gated Regression-Aware Skill Proposer for Self-Improving LLM Agents

LLM agents acting in structured environments fail in operational rather than conversational ways, and reliability depends on procedural knowledge of the environment. Prior self-improvement methods accumulate natural-language guidance without checking that each new item preserves previously correct behavior, so a note that fixes one trajectory can silently regress another. We introduce GRASP (Gated Regression-Aware Skill Proposer), which treats agent improvement as a sequence of edits to a bounded skill library, admitting each candidate only if it produces a net improvement on a balanced held-out probe under a hard regression budget. We evaluate GRASP across five base models (gpt-oss-120b, DeepSeek V4 Flash, Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite, GPT-4.1, GPT-5.4) on two FHIR-based clinical benchmarks. On MedAgentBench, GRASP lifts gpt-oss-120b from 40.6% to 88.8%, exceeds the strongest of five self-improvement baselines by 21.0 points, and improves every other base model by 17.2 to 40.3 points. Ablations attribute the gain to comparative proposal generation, the acceptance gate, and the hard regression budget rather than to skill writing itself, which without validation is no better than using no skills. The mechanism generalizes beyond the clinical domain, improving agents on three of four non-clinical environments and remaining flat only where the action space is open-ended. Frozen libraries transfer across models, where skills from a stronger model improve weaker executors beyond what they learn for themselves while the reverse does not, an asymmetry that no ungated baseline reproduces.

Johannes Moll, Jean-Philippe Corbeil, Jiazhen Pan +4

1Technical University of Munich and TUM University Hospital · 2Microsoft Healthcare & Life Sciences

LLM Agent Self-Improvement LLM Agent Skill Learning LLM Agents LLM Agent Reliability

May 28, 2026cs.CL

SkillBrew: Multi-Objective Curation of Skill Banks for LLM Agents

Retrieval-augmented LLM agents increasingly rely on curated skill banks: collections of reusable textual principles that guide decision making on complex tasks. Existing approaches typically expand these banks in an append-only fashion, continuously adding new skills without removing redundant, outdated, or harmful ones, resulting in inefficient and poorly curated repositories. In this paper, we formulate the skill bank curation as a constrained multi-objective problem: a desirable bank must be useful for the agent, diverse in its content, and provide good coverage of the query distribution. To this end, we introduce SkillBrew, a multi-objective curation framework that formalizes skill bank curation as Pareto-aware optimization under a utility constraint, and solves it via a bi-level propose-then-verify loop. We evaluate our approach on two public benchmarks. Our findings suggest that treating skill banks as objects of principled curation, rather than ever-growing append-only logs, is an important step toward building self-improving LLM agents.

Wentao Hu, Zhendong Chu, Yiming Zhang +6

City University of Hong Kong · Squirrel Ai Learning · University of Science and Technology of China +4

LLM Agent Self-Improvement LLM Agent Skill Learning

May 28, 2026cs.CL

Learning Design Skills as Memory Policies for Agentic Photonic Inverse Design

Photonic crystal fiber (PCF) inverse design remains challenging because candidate geometries must satisfy coupled optical targets under expensive electromagnetic simulation. Existing pipelines improve surrogate prediction or one-shot parameter recommendation, but they do not accumulate reusable design knowledge across iterative trials. We formulate PCF inverse design as a memory-policy learning problem and propose SkillPCF, a closed-loop agent framework that combines a physics-guided memory skill bank, reinforcement-learned skill selection, and simulator-grounded skill evolution. We further construct a real-world dataset with 479 expert interaction traces (2,507 spans) and 553 memory-dependent evaluation queries covering dispersion engineering, loss optimization, and multi-objective design. Experiments across multiple LLM backbones and classical baselines show that SkillPCF achieves stronger design-quality and efficiency trade-offs under practical simulation budgets, demonstrating the effectiveness of our proposed memory-skill learning paradigm for physics-aware PCF inverse design.

Shengchao Chen, Ting Shu, Sufen Ren

AAII, University of Technology Sydney · School of Artificial Intelligence, Shenzhen University · School of Information and Communication Engineering, Hainan University

LLM Agent Skill Learning Physics-Informed ML Memory-Augmented Agents Inverse Design RL for LLM Agents

May 27, 2026cs.LG

From Human Guidance to Autonomy: Agent Skill System for End-to-End LLM Deployment on Spatial NPUs

Spatial neural processing units (NPUs) provide an energy-efficient platform for edge LLM inference, but efficiently deploying an LLM end-to-end on such hardware remains labor-intensive. Although AI coding agents have begun to lower this cost, existing studies have largely focused on single-kernel optimization rather than end-to-end LLM deployment on resource-constrained spatial NPUs. We present a two-stage methodology, instantiated on the AMD XDNA 2 NPU, that progresses from human-guided development to agent autonomy. In the first stage, we develop a reference deployment of Llama-3.2-1B through human-guided agent assistance. The resulting implementation achieves a speedup of 2.2x on prefill and 4.0x on decode over the hand-optimized baseline, with the optimization trajectory and its lessons recorded as structured documentation throughout. In the second stage, we distill the documentation into an agent skill system consisting of eight phases, orchestrating the optimization and debugging skill sets, with numerical correctness strictly enforced at each phase. Using our agent skill system, we autonomously deploy eight additional decoder-only LLMs (Llama-3.2-3B, SmolLM2-1.7B, Qwen2.5-{0.5B, 1.5B, 3B}, Qwen3-{0.6B, 1.7B, 4B}) end-to-end on the AMD XDNA 2 NPU using the open-source compiler stack. To our knowledge, these models have not previously been deployed on AMD NPUs via any open-source software stack. Each deployment completes in 0.5-4 hours of agent wall time with almost no human guidance, and passes the numerical-correctness gates, demonstrating functional generalization to previously unencountered LLMs. Three of the eight match or exceed the sustained performance of our Llama-3.2-1B reference deployment, suggesting that the resulting implementations can be competitive without additional model-specific human engineering.

Jiajie Li, Erwei Wang, Zhiru Zhang +1

Cornell University · AMD

AI Accelerator Inference LLM Agent Orchestration LLM Agent Skill Learning LLM Inference Acceleration

May 27, 2026cs.CL

Skill0.5: Joint Skill Internalization and Utilization for Out-of-Distribution Generalization in Agentic Reinforcement Learning

Equipping large language models with explicit skills has emerged as a promising paradigm for enabling autonomous agents to solve complex tasks. Agent skills can be inherently divided into general skills for broad cognitive transfer and task-specific skills for dynamic execution. However, existing skill-based reinforcement learning (RL) methods typically force a rigid choice between full externalization, which incurs prohibitive context overhead, and full internalization, which risks overfitting and knowledge conflicts. To address this dilemma, we propose Skill0.5, a novel agentic RL framework that explicitly differentiates skill treatments by combining general skill internalization with task-specific skill utilization. Driven by a dynamic, difficulty-aware router, Skill0.5 streams tasks into distinct mastery tiers to apply tailored optimization strategies: it internalizes general skills via privileged distillation to build a cognitive foundation for hard tasks, while using diagnostic probing on easy tasks to penalize shortcuts and enforce specific skill utilization. Experiments on ALFWorld and WebShop demonstrate that Skill0.5 outperforms both memory-based and skill-based RL baselines, yielding performance improvements across both in-distribution and out-of-distribution scenarios.

Jiapeng Zhu, Jianxiang Yu, Yibo Zhao +5

1East China Normal University, 2Meituan Longcat Team · 1East China Normal University · 2Meituan Longcat Team

Agentic RL OOD Generalization LLM Agent Skill Learning

May 27, 2026cs.AI

You Live More Than Once: Towards Hierarchical Skill Meta-Evolving

Test-time skill evolving is regarded as a new paradigm for enhancing deployed agentic systems. Existing works mainly focus on hard-coded skill evolving strategies or parametric learning that rely on expensive parameter updates in the underlying LLMs. In this paper, we demonstrate that test-time refinement of the skill evolving framework itself is necessary for continuous improvement of the agent systems in different downstream scenarios, and lightweight algorithmic adaptation is feasible. Specifically, we propose HiSME, a lightweight hierarchical skill meta-evolving solution that jointly optimizes skills and the skill evolving strategy by learning meta-skills from agents' task execution traces. Experiments on diverse agentic benchmarks show that meta-evolving can produce a higher-quality skill library than pure skill evolving and can derive diverse meta-skills for different scenarios, thereby facilitating future continual experience learning. Our code is temporarily public at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/HiSME-BD45.

Xujun Li, Kehan Zheng, Mingyuan Zhao +7

Department of Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua University · Huawei Foundation Model Department

Meta-Learning LLM Agent Skill Learning Self-Evolving Agents

May 27, 2026cs.CL

ESC-Skills: Discovering and Self-Evolving Skills for Emotional Support Conversations

Existing emotional support conversation (ESC) systems mainly rely on end-to-end response generation or coarse strategy supervision, offering limited interpretability and little support for systematic skill improvement. We propose ESC-Skills, a skill-centric framework that discovers and self-evolves executable emotional support skills. We first model localized support interactions as Intervention Units (IUs), which capture state--action--outcome dynamics between seeker states, support interventions, and post-response emotional changes. Based on IUs extracted from both successful and failed ESC dialogues, we construct the ESC-Skills Bank, a repository of executable emotional support skills containing intervention guidance, applicability conditions, expected outcomes, and potential risks. To further improve robustness, we introduce a multi-profile self-evolutionary refinement framework in which an ESC agent interacts with diverse simulated seeker profiles under SAGE evaluation. The resulting interaction traces are analyzed to identify missing skills, unsafe interventions, and profile-specific failure patterns, which are then used to refine the Skills Bank through simulation-based verification. Experimental results demonstrate that ESC-Skills improves both response-level quality and dialogue-level emotional outcomes while providing more interpretable and controllable support behaviors. We will release the code, prompts, and ESC-Skills Bank at https://github.com/aliyun/qwen-dianjin.

Jie Zhu, Huaixia Dou, Shuo Jiang +5

School of Computer Science and Technology, Soochow University · 2Qwen DianJin Team, Alibaba Cloud Computing

Emotional Support Conversation LLM Agent Skill Learning Self-Evolving Agents

May 27, 2026cs.AI

SKILLC: Learning Autonomous Skill Internalization in LLM Agents via Contrastive Credit Assignment

Structured skill prompts improve exploration in long-horizon agentic reinforcement learning (RL). Skill-augmented RL methods retain external skills at inference, while skill-internalization RL methods withdraw them during training to enable autonomous performance. However, existing internalization approaches only use skill-helpfulness contrast for curriculum control, leaving the policy update unchanged and unable to distinguish skill-dependent from autonomous success. We propose SkillC, a framework based on Contrastive Skill Credit Assignment (CSCA) that converts this contrast into a direct learning signal for internalization. \textsc{SkillC} samples paired skill-injected and skill-free rollouts for tasks from active skill types within the same policy update, and injects their task-level contrast into optimization via a dual-stream advantage estimator that preserves global ranking while applying a one-sided correction toward skill-free success. A smoothed validation-level signal further drives an adaptive curriculum over attribution strength, rollout allocation, and monotonic active-set pruning. Experiments on ALFWorld and WebShop show that, without runtime skill access, SkillC surpasses the strongest prior skill-internalization RL baseline by 5.5% and 4.4%, respectively, while remaining competitive with skill-augmented RL methods.

Hongxiang Lin, Zhirui Kuai, Erpeng Xue +1

Meituan

LLM Agent Skill Learning Credit Assignment RL for LLM Agents

May 26, 2026cs.AI

SkillGrad: Optimizing Agent Skills Like Gradient Descent

Agent skills provide a lightweight way to adapt LLM agents to specialized domains by storing reusable procedural knowledge in structured files. However, whether downloaded from third parties or self-generated, these skills are often unreliable, incomplete, or outdated. Existing skill-evolution methods often address these deficiencies through heuristic reflections without an explicit optimization formulation. In this paper, we propose SkillGrad, a gradient-descent-inspired framework for optimizing agent skills. SkillGrad treats the skill package as a structured parameter to optimize in a gradient descent fashion: task executions provide trajectory-level loss evidence, automatic diagnoses then provide text-based gradients that indicate the correction directions. To stabilize optimization across iterations, a momentum agent accumulates recurring diagnostic patterns into a persistent memory overlay. Finally, an LLM-based patcher executes the parameter update by applying layer-aware edits to the skill package. Evaluated on SpreadsheetBench Verified and WikiTableQuestions, SkillGrad consistently outperforms training-based skill evolution baselines across two backbone LLMs, improving over the strongest training-based baseline by

6.7

percentage points on average. Ablations further show that momentum and contrastive diagnosis both contribute to the final skill quality.

Hanyu Wang, Yifan Lan, Bochuan Cao +2

College of Information Sciences and Technology The Pennsylvania State University University Park, PA, USA

Large Language Model-Guided Optimization LLM Agent Self-Improvement LLM Agent Skill Learning

May 26, 2026cs.AI

MUSE-Autoskill: Self-Evolving Agents via Skill Creation, Memory, Management, and Evaluation

Large language model (LLM) agents rely on reusable skills to solve complex tasks, but existing skill creation approaches often treat skills as isolated, static artifacts, limiting reusability, reliability, and long-term improvement. We propose MUSE-Autoskill Agent (Memory-Utilizing Skill Evolution), a skill-centric agent framework that creates, reuses, and refines skills under a unified lifecycle: creation, memory, management, evaluation, and refinement. MUSE creates skills on demand, stores them across tasks, retrieves them through a skill catalog, and accumulates per-skill experience for later reuse and adaptation. Across the main reported settings on SkillsBench and SkillLearnBench, MUSE-Autoskill outperforms Hermes, Codex, and Claude Code. On SkillsBench, its self-created skills surpass human-authored skills on the successfully covered subset (85.24% vs. 81.17%), showing that lifecycle-managed skills can distill agent experience into highly effective reusable assets; MUSE-created skills also transfer to Hermes more effectively than Codex- or Claude-created skills, reaching 51.90% accuracy under transfer. These results highlight the importance of treating skills as long-lived, experience-aware, and testable assets.

Huawei Lin, Peng Li, Jie Song +2

ByteDance Inc.

LLM Agent Skill Learning LLM Agent Skill Retrieval Self-Evolving Agents Memory-Augmented Language Model Agents

May 26, 2026cs.CL

EmoDistill: Offline Emotion Skill Distillation for Language Model Agents in Adversarial Negotiation

Post-trained LLMs are often optimized to produce helpful, polite, and accommodating responses. In adversarial negotiation, however, such behavior can become a vulnerability: emotionally framed language may influence an agent's bargaining decisions in ways that conflict with its user's objectives. We therefore introduce EmoDistill, an offline framework for distilling emotional negotiation skills from LLM-LLM interactions into smaller language-model agents. Here, an emotional negotiation skill is a state-conditioned behavior that determines which explicit emotion to invoke in a bargaining state and how to realize that emotion as an effective negotiation utterance. EmoDistill learns these two components separately: an Implicit Q-Learning (IQL) selector learns which emotion to express in each bargaining state, while a LoRA-adapted 7B policy learns emotion-conditioned expression through Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Judge Policy Optimization (JPO). Across four emotion-sensitive negotiation domains, the full EmoDistill policy achieves competitive utility and improves over vanilla and IQL-only baselines in most settings. Emotion-free ablations show that removing the explicit emotion channel substantially reduces overall negotiation utility, while transfer experiments reveal partial, domain-dependent transfer and robustness to unseen LLM counterparties.

Yunbo Long, Haolang Zhao, Lukas Beckenbauer +2

University of Cambridge · Technical University of Munich · Exiger LLC +1

Multi-Agent Negotiation Automated Negotiation LLM Agent Skill Learning Language Model Distillation RL for LLM Agents Emotion-Aware Dialogue Generation

May 26, 2026cs.CL

Verilog-Evolve: Feedback-Driven and Skill-Evolving Verilog Generation

Large language models (LLMs) have improved Verilog generation from natural-language specifications, but most pipelines still treat generation as isolated sampling followed by functional checking. This is insufficient for practical RTL design, where useful Verilog must be correct, synthesizable, timing-conscious, and friendly to downstream hardware objectives. We present Verilog-Evolve, a feedback-driven framework for versioned Verilog refinement and cross-session skill evolution. For each task, Verilog-Evolve generates diverse minor candidates, evaluates them with executable feedback from functional simulation, Yosys synthesis, ABC timing proxy, and optional GEMM metrics, then promotes the best candidate into a major version under configurable scoring. To improve across tasks, the system maintains modular skill guidance, retrieves skills according to task and feedback context, and evolves candidate skills from logged histories through create/improve/skip decisions and verifier reports. Experiments on VerilogEval and mixed-precision GEMM tasks show that Verilog-Evolve improves final functional success and promotion stability while producing more downstream-friendly RTL under open-source synthesis, timing-proxy, and netlist-level GEMM objectives. Validation-gated skill evolution further improves GEMM downstream quality and achieves the best downstream score and GEMM held-out pass rate among the evaluated skill modes.

Zehua Pei, Hui-Ling Zhen, Yu Zhang +3

The Chinese University of Hong Kong · Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd

Large Language Model-Guided Optimization Execution-Guided Code Generation Code Generation LLM Agent Skill Learning RTL Code Generation

May 25, 2026cs.RO

When Search Becomes Memory: Accelerating Robot Design Discovery with Self-Evolving Skills

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as proposal generators for evolutionary robot design, yet most loops remain memoryless: simulator results shape the next population but are not preserved as reusable design knowledge. We present Auto-Robotist, a self-evolving LLM agent that distills morphology-search traces into an explicit natural-language skill library. Each skill stores a structural archetype, evidence-grounded positive and negative rules, and the evaluated designs that support them, making design memory inspectable rather than implicit in a population. During search, the agent retrieves skills to condition LLM edits of elite bodies while retaining a Genetic Algorithm (GA) mutation path for exploration; after evaluation, it updates the library through Add, Diagnose, and Merge. Across seven EvoGym tasks spanning locomotion, traversal, and object interaction, Auto-Robotist improves cold-start 5x5 search and transfers learned skills to 10x10 design spaces, where reference-conditioned transfer outperforms GA on every task. These results suggest that LLM agents can convert expensive physical evaluations into reusable, auditable design principles. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/wangyf9/Auto-Robotist .

Yunfei Wang, Xiaohao Xu, Yang Li +1

University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Robotics LLM Agent Skill Learning Evolutionary Robotics Self-Evolving Agents Memory-Augmented Language Model Agents

May 25, 2026cs.SE

SetupX: Can LLM Agents Learn from Past Failures in Functionality-Correct Code Repository Setup?

Functionality-correct repository setup aims to configure execution environments (e.g., dependencies, build scripts) to successfully execute a repository's documented features. It presents significant challenges due to diverse, repository-specific failures, including dependency incompatibilities, missing toolchains, incomplete installations, and verification-strategy mismatches. Existing LLM agents struggle to robustly resolve these issues, specifically failing to support (1) cross-repository experience transfer, (2) multi-step trial-and-repair under non-invertible state changes, and (3) robust verification of setup outcomes to distinguish setup-induced failures from repository bugs. To address this, we introduce SetupX, an experiential learning-based setup framework. First, we construct a Self-Evolving Experience Representation (XPU), a dual-modality knowledge unit encoding setup signals, textual guidance, executable actions to dynamically transfer verified environment fixes to unseen repositories. Second, we employ Experience-Augmented Speculative Execution backed by a LIFO Docker snapshot stack, enabling the agent to proactively trial fixes and safely roll back to known-good states. Third, we introduce a Prosecutor-Judge Verification Protocol that separates evidence collection from final judgment, enabling more reliable setup verification beyond superficial build-time metrics. Evaluation results on carefully-crafted benchmarks show SetupX achieves highest performance (e.g., 92% pass rate) and outperforms the strongest baseline by over 19%. Crucially, SetupX excels in complex multi-repository setup requiring coordinating multiple interconnected services across different containers. The code repository is available at https://github.com/OpenDataBox/SetupX.

Zihang Zhou, Ziqian Ren, Yukai Wu +7

Shanghai Jiao Tong University · Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications · Independent Researcher +2

Software Engineering Agents LLM Agent Self-Improvement LLM Agent Skill Learning

May 25, 2026cs.AI

CODESKILL: Learning Self-Evolving Skills for Coding Agents

Coding agents produce rich trajectories while solving software-engineering tasks. To enable agent self-evolution, these trajectories can be distilled into reusable procedural skills that compactly encode experience to guide future behavior. However, existing skill construction and maintenance methods often rely on fixed prompts and heuristic update rules, leaving it unclear how knowledge should be selected, abstracted, and maintained to best serve downstream agents. We propose CODESKILL, an LLM-based framework that reformulates skill extraction and skill-bank maintenance as a learnable management policy. CODESKILL extracts multi-granularity procedural skills from coding-agent trajectories, evolves skills with new experience, and maintains a compact skill bank for future task solving. We train CODESKILL with reinforcement learning, using a hybrid reward that combines dense rubric-based skill-quality feedback with sparse verifiable execution feedback from the frozen downstream agent. Experiments on EnvBench, SWE-Bench Verified, and Terminal-Bench 2 show that CODESKILL improves average pass rate by 9.69 over the no-skill baseline and by 4.01 over the strongest prompt-based or memory baseline, while maintaining the skill bank at a stable size during iterative construction.

Yanzhou Li, Yiran Zhang, Xiaoyu Zhang +2

Nanyang Technological University · 2Zhejiang University

Coding Agents LLM Agent Skill Learning LLM Agents RL for LLM Agents Self-Evolving Agents

May 24, 2026cs.AI

PANDO: Efficient Multimodal AI Agents via Online Skill Distillation

Recent advances in multimodal web agents often rely on increased inference-time computation, including rollout search, verifier passes, offline skill discovery, and specialist model stacks. This raises a central question: can a web agent become more efficient as it accumulates experience, rather than more expensive? We first analyze trajectories from VisualWebArena and identify three recurring sources of inefficiency: repeat-action loops, hidden discovery costs, and low prompt-cache reuse. We then introduce PANDO, a single-rollout online skill-distillation framework that maintains a structured Skill Library and combines progress reflection, confidence-based skill demotion, hierarchical routing, visual compression, and cache-aware prompting. On the full set of 910 VisualWebArena tasks, PANDO achieves a 58.3% success rate, outperforming SGV (54.0%) and our WALT reproduction (45.2%), while using 58% fewer tokens than SGV and 61% fewer tokens than WALT, without any pre-evaluation discovery budget. A 300-task ablation further shows that rules and routines provide most of the success gains, while routing, compression, and cache-aware prompting convert the larger skill library into lower marginal token cost. Finally, we introduce three trajectory-level efficiency metrics -- Action Repetition Rate, Step Overhead Ratio, and Prompt Cache Utilization -- to make efficiency visible beyond terminal success.

Yubo Li, Yidi Miao, Yuntian Shen +1

LLM Agent Workflow Optimization LLM Agent Skill Learning LLM Agents Knowledge Distillation Web Agents

May 22, 2026cs.AI

SkillEvolBench: Benchmarking the Evolution from Episodic Experience to Procedural Skills

Large language model (LLM) agents accumulate rich episodic trajectories while solving real-world tasks, but it remains unclear whether such experience can be distilled into reusable procedural skills. We introduce SkillEvolBench, a diagnostic benchmark for evaluating this step from experience reuse to skill formation. It contains 180 tasks across six real-world agent environments, organized into role-conditioned task families with shared latent procedures. Agents learn from acquisition tasks, update an external skill library using compacted trajectories and verifier feedback, and then face frozen deployment tasks testing context shift, adversarial shortcuts, and composition. By comparing self-generated and curated-start skill evolution against no-skill and raw-trajectory controls, SkillEvolBench separates procedural abstraction from base capability, curated prior knowledge, and direct reuse of episodic traces. Across ten model configurations and three agent harnesses, we find that current agents often adapt locally but rarely form robust reusable skills. Skill-based conditions can improve acquisition or replay, and individual models sometimes gain on specific deployment axes, but these gains are unstable under frozen deployment. Raw-trajectory reuse frequently outperforms distilled skills, suggesting that current abstraction procedures discard contextual and procedural cues that remain useful for future tasks. Capacity and cost analyses further show that writing more skills or larger Tier-3 resource libraries is not sufficient: additional updates can improve coverage while introducing episode-specific drift and procedural clutter. These findings position SkillEvolBench as a testbed for measuring when one-off experience becomes durable procedural knowledge rather than task-local memory.

Yingtie Lei, Zhongwei Wan, Jiankun Zhang +13

1The Ohio State University · 2The University of Chicago · University College London +4

LLM Agent Evaluation LLM Agent Skill Learning AI Agent Benchmarks Agent Skill Learning