Ctx2Skill lets language models autonomously evolve context-specific skills via multi-agent self-play, improving performance on context learning tasks without human supervision.
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SkillRL: Evolving Agents via Recursive Skill-Augmented Reinforcement Learning
31 Pith papers cite this work. Polarity classification is still indexing.
abstract
Large Language Model (LLM) agents have shown stunning results in complex tasks, yet they often operate in isolation, failing to learn from past experiences. Existing memory-based methods primarily store raw trajectories, which are often redundant and noise-heavy. This prevents agents from extracting high-level, reusable behavioral patterns that are essential for generalization. In this paper, we propose SkillRL, a framework that bridges the gap between raw experience and policy improvement through automatic skill discovery and recursive evolution. Our approach introduces an experience-based distillation mechanism to build a hierarchical skill library SkillBank, an adaptive retrieval strategy for general and task-specific heuristics, and a recursive evolution mechanism that allows the skill library to co-evolve with the agent's policy during reinforcement learning. These innovations significantly reduce the token footprint while enhancing reasoning utility. Experimental results on ALFWorld, WebShop and seven search-augmented tasks demonstrate that SkillRL achieves state-of-the-art performance, outperforming strong baselines over 15.3% and maintaining robustness as task complexity increases. Code is available at this https://github.com/aiming-lab/SkillRL.
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2026 31representative citing papers
AEvo introduces a meta-agent that edits the evolution procedure or agent context based on accumulated state, outperforming baselines by 26% relative improvement on agentic benchmarks and achieving SOTA on open-ended tasks.
OLIVIA treats LLM agent action selection as a contextual linear bandit over frozen hidden states and applies UCB exploration to adapt online, yielding consistent gains over static ReAct and prompt-based baselines on four benchmarks.
Evolving-RL jointly optimizes experience extraction and utilization in LLM agents via RL with separate evaluation signals, delivering up to 98.7% relative gains on out-of-distribution tasks in ALFWorld and Mind2Web.
RewardHarness self-evolves a tool-and-skill library from 100 preference examples to reach 47.4% accuracy on image-edit evaluation, beating GPT-5, and yields stronger RL-tuned models.
AHE automates coding-agent harness evolution via component, experience, and decision observability, raising Terminal-Bench 2 pass@1 from 69.7% to 77.0% with transfer gains across models and benchmarks.
COSPLAY co-evolves an LLM decision agent with a skill bank agent to improve long-horizon game performance, reporting over 25.1% average reward gains versus frontier LLM baselines on single-player benchmarks.
GraSP introduces executable skill graphs that improve LLM agent rewards by up to 19 points and reduce steps by up to 41% over ReAct, Reflexion, ExpeL, and flat-skill baselines across ALFWorld, ScienceWorld, WebShop, and InterCode.
SkillFlow benchmark shows lifelong skill evolution yields modest gains for some models like Claude Opus 4.6 but limited or negative utility for others despite high skill usage.
SAGER equips LLM recommendation agents with per-user evolving policy skills via two-representation architecture, contrastive CoT diagnosis, and skill-augmented listwise reasoning, yielding SOTA gains orthogonal to memory accumulation.
This survey introduces the Generate-Filter-Control-Replay (GFCR) taxonomy to structure rollout pipelines for RL-based post-training of reasoning LLMs.
MMSkills turns public interaction trajectories into compact multimodal skill packages that visual agents can consult at runtime to improve decision-making on benchmarks.
MAP improves LLM agent reasoning by constructing a structured cognitive map of the environment before task execution, yielding performance gains on benchmarks like ARC-AGI-3 and superior training data via the new MAP-2K dataset.
SkillGraph represents skills as nodes in an evolving directed graph with typed dependency edges and updates the graph from RL trajectories to boost compositional task performance.
SLIM dynamically optimizes active external skills in agentic RL via leave-one-skill-out marginal contribution estimates and three lifecycle operations, outperforming baselines by 7.1% on ALFWorld and SearchQA while showing some skills are internalized and others remain external.
A meta-skill authors and refines prose-and-code skills for agents by learning from post-deployment failures with an overfit audit, achieving 56.8% accuracy on SkillsBench tasks versus 43.6% for human-curated skills.
HAGE proposes a trainable weighted graph memory framework with LLM intent classification, dynamic edge modulation, and RL optimization that improves long-horizon reasoning accuracy in agentic LLMs over static baselines.
PDI-guided distillation from environment-verified trajectories yields skills that surpass no-skill baselines and human-written skills across 86 tasks with far lower inference cost.
SearchSkill introduces an evolving SkillBank and two-stage SFT to make LLM search query planning explicit via skill selection, improving exact match on QA benchmarks and retrieval behavior.
SkillMaster enables LLM agents to autonomously develop skills via trajectory review, counterfactual evaluation, and DualAdv-GRPO training, boosting success rates by 8.8% on ALFWorld and 9.3% on WebShop.
SkillOS is an RL recipe that learns to curate reusable skills for self-evolving LLM agents, outperforming memory-free and memory-based baselines while generalizing across executors and domains.
ClawTrace enables cost-aware LLM agent skill distillation by tracing per-step costs and generating preserve, prune, and repair patches, with ablations showing reduced regressions and prune rules transferring to cut costs by 32%.
SkillGraph jointly evolves agent skills and collaboration topologies in multi-agent vision-language systems using a multimodal graph transformer and a skill designer, yielding consistent performance gains on benchmarks.
The Experience Compression Spectrum unifies memory, skills, and rules in LLM agents along increasing compression levels and identifies the absence of adaptive cross-level compression as the missing diagonal.
citing papers explorer
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From Context to Skills: Can Language Models Learn from Context Skillfully?
Ctx2Skill lets language models autonomously evolve context-specific skills via multi-agent self-play, improving performance on context learning tasks without human supervision.
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Harnessing Agentic Evolution
AEvo introduces a meta-agent that edits the evolution procedure or agent context based on accumulated state, outperforming baselines by 26% relative improvement on agentic benchmarks and achieving SOTA on open-ended tasks.
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OLIVIA: Online Learning via Inference-time Action Adaptation for Decision Making in LLM ReAct Agents
OLIVIA treats LLM agent action selection as a contextual linear bandit over frozen hidden states and applies UCB exploration to adapt online, yielding consistent gains over static ReAct and prompt-based baselines on four benchmarks.
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Evolving-RL: End-to-End Optimization of Experience-Driven Self-Evolving Capability within Agents
Evolving-RL jointly optimizes experience extraction and utilization in LLM agents via RL with separate evaluation signals, delivering up to 98.7% relative gains on out-of-distribution tasks in ALFWorld and Mind2Web.
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RewardHarness: Self-Evolving Agentic Post-Training
RewardHarness self-evolves a tool-and-skill library from 100 preference examples to reach 47.4% accuracy on image-edit evaluation, beating GPT-5, and yields stronger RL-tuned models.
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Agentic Harness Engineering: Observability-Driven Automatic Evolution of Coding-Agent Harnesses
AHE automates coding-agent harness evolution via component, experience, and decision observability, raising Terminal-Bench 2 pass@1 from 69.7% to 77.0% with transfer gains across models and benchmarks.
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Co-Evolving LLM Decision and Skill Bank Agents for Long-Horizon Tasks
COSPLAY co-evolves an LLM decision agent with a skill bank agent to improve long-horizon game performance, reporting over 25.1% average reward gains versus frontier LLM baselines on single-player benchmarks.
-
GraSP: Graph-Structured Skill Compositions for LLM Agents
GraSP introduces executable skill graphs that improve LLM agent rewards by up to 19 points and reduce steps by up to 41% over ReAct, Reflexion, ExpeL, and flat-skill baselines across ALFWorld, ScienceWorld, WebShop, and InterCode.
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SkillFlow:Benchmarking Lifelong Skill Discovery and Evolution for Autonomous Agents
SkillFlow benchmark shows lifelong skill evolution yields modest gains for some models like Claude Opus 4.6 but limited or negative utility for others despite high skill usage.
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SAGER: Self-Evolving User Policy Skills for Recommendation Agent
SAGER equips LLM recommendation agents with per-user evolving policy skills via two-representation architecture, contrastive CoT diagnosis, and skill-augmented listwise reasoning, yielding SOTA gains orthogonal to memory accumulation.
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Generate, Filter, Control, Replay: A Comprehensive Survey of Rollout Strategies for LLM Reinforcement Learning
This survey introduces the Generate-Filter-Control-Replay (GFCR) taxonomy to structure rollout pipelines for RL-based post-training of reasoning LLMs.
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MMSkills: Towards Multimodal Skills for General Visual Agents
MMSkills turns public interaction trajectories into compact multimodal skill packages that visual agents can consult at runtime to improve decision-making on benchmarks.
-
MAP: A Map-then-Act Paradigm for Long-Horizon Interactive Agent Reasoning
MAP improves LLM agent reasoning by constructing a structured cognitive map of the environment before task execution, yielding performance gains on benchmarks like ARC-AGI-3 and superior training data via the new MAP-2K dataset.
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SkillGraph: Skill-Augmented Reinforcement Learning for Agents via Evolving Skill Graphs
SkillGraph represents skills as nodes in an evolving directed graph with typed dependency edges and updates the graph from RL trajectories to boost compositional task performance.
-
Dynamic Skill Lifecycle Management for Agentic Reinforcement Learning
SLIM dynamically optimizes active external skills in agentic RL via leave-one-skill-out marginal contribution estimates and three lifecycle operations, outperforming baselines by 7.1% on ALFWorld and SearchQA while showing some skills are internalized and others remain external.
-
SkillEvolver: Skill Learning as a Meta-Skill
A meta-skill authors and refines prose-and-code skills for agents by learning from post-deployment failures with an overfit audit, achieving 56.8% accuracy on SkillsBench tasks versus 43.6% for human-curated skills.
-
HAGE: Harnessing Agentic Memory via RL-Driven Weighted Graph Evolution
HAGE proposes a trainable weighted graph memory framework with LLM intent classification, dynamic edge modulation, and RL optimization that improves long-horizon reasoning accuracy in agentic LLMs over static baselines.
-
Evidence Over Plans: Online Trajectory Verification for Skill Distillation
PDI-guided distillation from environment-verified trajectories yields skills that surpass no-skill baselines and human-written skills across 86 tasks with far lower inference cost.
-
SearchSkill: Teaching LLMs to Use Search Tools with Evolving Skill Banks
SearchSkill introduces an evolving SkillBank and two-stage SFT to make LLM search query planning explicit via skill selection, improving exact match on QA benchmarks and retrieval behavior.
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SkillMaster: Toward Autonomous Skill Mastery in LLM Agents
SkillMaster enables LLM agents to autonomously develop skills via trajectory review, counterfactual evaluation, and DualAdv-GRPO training, boosting success rates by 8.8% on ALFWorld and 9.3% on WebShop.
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SkillOS: Learning Skill Curation for Self-Evolving Agents
SkillOS is an RL recipe that learns to curate reusable skills for self-evolving LLM agents, outperforming memory-free and memory-based baselines while generalizing across executors and domains.
-
ClawTrace: Cost-Aware Tracing for LLM Agent Skill Distillation
ClawTrace enables cost-aware LLM agent skill distillation by tracing per-step costs and generating preserve, prune, and repair patches, with ablations showing reduced regressions and prune rules transferring to cut costs by 32%.
-
SkillGraph: Self-Evolving Multi-Agent Collaboration with Multimodal Graph Topology
SkillGraph jointly evolves agent skills and collaboration topologies in multi-agent vision-language systems using a multimodal graph transformer and a skill designer, yielding consistent performance gains on benchmarks.
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GrandCode: Achieving Grandmaster Level in Competitive Programming via Agentic Reinforcement Learning
GrandCode is the first AI system to consistently beat all human participants and place first in live Codeforces competitive programming contests.
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Ace-Skill: Bootstrapping Multimodal Agents with Prioritized and Clustered Evolution
Ace-Skill boosts multimodal agent self-evolution via prioritized rollouts with lazy-decay tracking and semantic knowledge clustering, yielding up to 35% relative gains on tool-use benchmarks and zero-shot transfer to smaller models.
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Learning CLI Agents with Structured Action Credit under Selective Observation
CLI agents trained with RL benefit from selective observation via σ-Reveal and structured credit assignment via A³ that leverages AST action sub-chains and trajectory margins.
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Skill1: Unified Evolution of Skill-Augmented Agents via Reinforcement Learning
Skill1 trains a single RL policy to co-evolve skill selection, utilization, and distillation in language model agents from one task-outcome reward, using low-frequency trends to credit selection and high-frequency variation to credit distillation, outperforming baselines on ALFWorld and WebShop.
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Web2BigTable: A Bi-Level Multi-Agent LLM System for Internet-Scale Information Search and Extraction
Web2BigTable introduces a bi-level multi-agent system that achieves new state-of-the-art results on wide-coverage and deep web-to-table search benchmarks through orchestration, coordination, and closed-loop reflection.
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A Comprehensive Survey on Agent Skills: Taxonomy, Techniques, and Applications
The paper surveys agent skills for LLM agents, organizing the literature into a four-stage lifecycle of representation, acquisition, retrieval, and evolution while highlighting their role in system scalability.
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Safactory: A Scalable Agentic Infrastructure for Training Trustworthy Autonomous Intelligence
Safactory integrates three platforms for simulation, data management, and agent evolution to create a unified pipeline for training trustworthy autonomous AI.