EvoSkill: Automated Skill Discovery for Multi-Agent Systems
On the map: LLM agents and tool use → Agent skill learning and evolution
Abstract (arXiv)
Coding agents are increasingly used as general-purpose problem solvers, but their flexibility does not by itself confer the domain expertise needed for specialized tasks. Recent work addresses this through textitagent skills: reusable workflows, and code, that augment agents with domain-specific capabilities. Most skills today are hand-crafted, and existing evolutionary approaches optimize low-level artifacts (e.g. prompts & code) that are tightly coupled to specific models and tasks. We introduce EvoSkill, a self-evolving framework that automatically discovers and refines agent skills through iterative failure analysis. EvoSkill analyzes execution failures, proposes new skills or edits to existing ones, and materializes them into structured, reusable skill folders. A Pareto frontier of agent programs governs selection, retaining only skills that improve held-out validation performance while the underlying model remains frozen. We evaluate EvoSkill on two benchmarks: OfficeQA, a grounded reasoning benchmark over U.S. Treasury data, where it improves exact-match accuracy by 7.3% (60.6% → 67.9%); and SealQA, a search-augmented QA benchmark with noisy retrieval, where it yields a 12.1% gain (26.6% → 38.7%). We also investigate the zero-shot transfer capabilties of skills evolved on one task to the other; in particular: skills evolved from SealQA transfers zero-shot to BrowseComp, improving accuracy by 5.3% without modification demonstrating that skill-level optimization produces transferable capabilities beyond the training task.
Key facts. Cited by 96 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Agent skill learning and evolution, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use. Builds on 8 of its 13 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 3 Mar 2026.
Builds on
8 of 13 references.
References · 8
- 2023Self-Refine: Iterative Refinement with Self-Feedbackcited by 3,317
- 2023Voyager: An Open-Ended Embodied Agent with Large Language Modelscited by 2,081
- 2025BrowseComp: A Simple Yet Challenging Benchmark for Browsing Agentscited by 616
- 2025GEPA: Reflective Prompt Evolution Can Outperform Reinforcement Learningcited by 449
- 2024Foundational Autoraters: Taming Large Language Models for Better Automatic Evaluationcited by 72
- 2025SealQA: Raising the Bar for Reasoning in Search-Augmented Language Modelscited by 65
- 2025Feedback Descent: Open-Ended Text Optimization via Pairwise Comparisoncited by 42
- 2026ROMA: Recursive Open Meta-Agent Framework for Long-Horizon Multi-Agent Systemscited by 3
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Citing papers per year: 2026: 96.
96 papers.
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- 2026Trace2Skill: Distill Trajectory-Local Lessons into Transferable Agent Skillscited by 161
- 2026SkillOpt: Executive Strategy for Self-Evolving Agent Skillscited by 122
- 2026SkillClaw: Let Skills Evolve Collectively with Agentic Evolvercited by 76
- 2026SkillLearnBench: Benchmarking Continual Learning Methods for Agent Skill Generation on Real-World Taskscited by 45
- 2026SkillOS: Learning Skill Curation for Self-Evolving Agentscited by 45
- 2026SKILLFOUNDRY: Building Self-Evolving Agent Skill Libraries from Heterogeneous Scientific Resourcescited by 38
- 2026SkillGen: Verified Inference-Time Agent Skill Synthesiscited by 29
- 2026MUSE-Autoskill: Self-Evolving Agents via Skill Creation, Memory, Management, and Evaluationcited by 23
- 2026SkillFlow:Benchmarking Lifelong Skill Discovery and Evolution for Autonomous Agentscited by 19
- 2026SkillsVote: Lifecycle Governance of Agent Skills from Collection, Recommendation to Evolutioncited by 18
- 2026From Raw Experience to Skill Consumption: A Systematic Study of Model-Generated Agent Skillscited by 18
- 2026A Comprehensive Survey on Agent Skills: Taxonomy, Techniques, and Applicationscited by 17
38 more
- 2026Experience Compression Spectrum: Unifying Memory, Skills, and Rules in LLM Agentscited by 16
- 2026SkillMOO: Multi-Objective Optimization of Agent Skills for Software Engineeringcited by 14
- 2026MMSkills: Towards Multimodal Skills for General Visual Agentscited by 13
- 2026SkillAudit: Ground-Truth-Free Skill Evolution via Paired Trajectory Auditingcited by 11
- 2026SkillGraph: Self-Evolving Multi-Agent Collaboration with Multimodal Graph Topologycited by 8
- 2026Managing Procedural Memory in LLM Agents: Control, Adaptation, and Evaluationcited by 8
- 2026SkillCoach: Self-Evolving Rubrics for Evaluating and Enhancing Agentic Skill-Usecited by 7
- 2026WikiSkill: Compiling Agent Experience into Persistent Knowledge for Skill Evolutioncited by 7
- 2026ABSTRAL: Automatic Design of Multi-Agent Systems Through Iterative Refinement and Topology Optimizationcited by 6
- 2026From Multi-Agent to Single-Agent: When Is Skill Distillation Beneficial?cited by 6
- 2026SkillLens: Adaptive Multi-Granularity Skill Reuse for Cost-Efficient LLM Agentscited by 6
- 2026SkillFlow: Flow-Driven Recursive Skill Evolution for Agentic Orchestrationcited by 6
- 2026CODESKILL: Learning Self-Evolving Skills for Coding Agentscited by 6
- 2026Dynamic Agent Skills: A Lifecycle Survey and Taxonomy of Evolving Skill Librariescited by 6
- 2026ASDA: Automated Skill Distillation and Adaptation for Financial Reasoningcited by 5
- 2026Skill0.5: Joint Skill Internalization and Utilization for Out-of-Distribution Generalization in Agentic Reinforcement Learningcited by 5
- 2026VideoWeaver: Evaluating and Evolving Skills for Agentic Long Video Generationcited by 5
- 2026COMFYCLAW: Self-Evolving Skill Harnesses for Image Generation Workflowscited by 5
- 2026DarwinX: Evolving Agent Harnesses Through Natural Selectioncited by 5
- 2026ClawTrace: Cost-Aware Tracing for LLM Agent Skill Distillationcited by 4
- 2026Rewarding the Scientific Process: Process-Level Reward Modeling for Agentic Data Analysiscited by 4
- 2026OpenSkillEval: Automatically Auditing the Open Skill Ecosystem for LLM Agentscited by 4
- 2026SkillSmith: Co-Evolving Skills and Tools for Self-Improving Agent Systemscited by 4
- 2026Self-Evolving Agents as Dynamic Graph Transformation: A Survey and New Perspectivecited by 4
- 2026SkillMAS: Skill Co-Evolution with LLM-based Multi-Agent Systemcited by 3
- 2026SkillEvolBench: Benchmarking the Evolution from Episodic Experience to Procedural Skillscited by 3
- 2026PILOT in the Loop: Live Self-Improvement for Long-Horizon Agentscited by 3
- 2026MIND-Skill: Quality-Guaranteed Skill Generation via Multi-Agent Induction and Deductioncited by 2
- 2026Test-Time Learning with an Evolving Librarycited by 2
- 2026Unsupervised Skill Discovery for Agentic Data Analysiscited by 2
- 2026OpenClaw-Skill: Collective Skill Tree Search for Agentic Large Language Modelscited by 2
- 2026Hierarchical Experimentalist Agentscited by 2
- 2026From Memory to Skills: Evidence-Grounded Co-Evolution Governance for Long-Horizon LLM Agentscited by 2
- 2026AgentStream: How Well Do Self-Evolving LLM Agents Perform Under Streaming Tasks?cited by 2
- 2026SkillAdam: Stable and Efficient Skill Evolution for Agentscited by 2
- 2026Beyond Task Completion: A Verification-vs.-Conformance Gap in Tool-Evolving Agentscited by 1
- 2026Agentic-imodels: Evolving agentic interpretability tools via autoresearchcited by 1
- 2026Safactory: A Scalable Agentic Infrastructure for Training Trustworthy Autonomous Intelligencecited by 1
50 most cited of 96 All 96 (JSON)
- 2026Which Skill to Distill? SGUID: Selecting a Compact Skill Bank for Model-Skill Co-Evolution8 Oct 2026
- 2026Trajectory-Guided Fault Localization for Agent Skill Evolution8 Oct 2026
- 2026Rep2Skill: Representation-Guided Skill Self-Evolution for LLM Agents30 Sep 2026
- 2026Retrieval-Augmented Skill Optimization via Cross-Harness Adaptation29 Sep 2026
- 2026SkillCome: Group Contrast Skill Optimization with Dual Memory29 Sep 2026
- 2026SKILLLITE: Evidence-Guided Malicious Skill Auditing with Compact LLMs29 Sep 2026
- 2026EASE: Behavior-Adaptive Skill Curation for Self-Evolving Agents29 Sep 2026
- 2026Beyond Skill Evolution: Self-Evolving Context Management Policies for Long-Horizon Agent Harnesses28 Sep 2026
- 2026Certified Long-Horizon Code Agent Evolution via Validation-Gated Skill Optimization26 Sep 2026
- 2026Enabling Timely Guidance before Skill Retrieval: Retaining Helpful Warm Tips in Agent Context26 Sep 2026
- 2026Analyzing and Mitigating Cost-Inefficient Behaviors in Coding Agents25 Sep 2026
- 2026GraphSkillEvo: Evolutionary Optimization of Graph-Structured Agent Skills18 Sep 2026
38 more
- 2026VideoResearcher: Self-Improving Tool Design for Long-Video Understanding17 Sep 2026
- 2026Bad Genius: Counterfactual-Guided Harness Evolution Beyond Task-Specific Shortcuts16 Sep 2026
- 2026MOSCOPT: Mixture-of-Skills Collective Optimization for LLM Agents13 Sep 2026
- 2026COBRA-Skills: Contextual Bandit-Guided Evolution for Agent Skill Optimization10 Sep 2026
- 2026Auto-RecSys: Harnessing Autonomous Research Agents for Industry-Scale Recommender System10 Sep 2026
- 2026SkillAdam: Stable and Efficient Skill Evolution for Agents8 Sep 2026
- 2026Subagents vs Agent Skills: Executing Reusable Knowledge for Long-Horizon Agentic Tasks7 Sep 2026
- 2026From Interaction Traces to Persistent Skills: Online Evolution for Computer-Use Agents4 Sep 2026
- 2026CoSkill: Joint Reinforcement Learning of Reasoning and Meta-Skill Agents for Hierarchical Skill Evolution4 Sep 2026
- 2026DMRL: Document-Mediated Reinforcement Learning for Skill Optimization in Advertising Recommendation2 Sep 2026
- 2026MASkills: Continual Skills Optimization for Multi-Agent LLM Systems2 Sep 2026
- 2026Towards a Systems Foundation for Agentic Skills: Architecture, Lifecycle, and Security30 Aug 2026
- 2026Toward Latent Language Model Skills Steering and Optimization: An Empirical Study29 Aug 2026
- 2026iCoder-27B: Recursive AI-Led Development of Frontier Industrial Coding Model28 Aug 2026
- 2026WikiSkill: Compiling Agent Experience into Persistent Knowledge for Skill Evolution27 Aug 2026
- 2026PILOT in the Loop: Live Self-Improvement for Long-Horizon Agents27 Aug 2026
- 2026Competence, Not Accuracy: A Diagnostic for Reference-Free Judge Gates in Skill Optimization19 Aug 2026
- 2026TRUSS: Towards Task-Reliable and User-Safe Automated Agent Skill Generation18 Aug 2026
- 2026Write, Execute, Refine: From Skill Followers to Skill Optimizers via Reinforcement Learning from Execution Feedback18 Aug 2026
- 2026CAPO: Constraint-Aware Prompt Optimization for LLM Agents17 Aug 2026
- 2026SkillEvo: Self-Renewing Evolution Gradients from Multi-Turn Interaction Feedback13 Aug 2026
- 2026Better, Faster, Stronger: Programmatic Skill Learning Best Reduces Agent Cost11 Aug 2026
- 2026Self-Evolving Code-with-Image Reasoning11 Aug 2026
- 2026Do Personalized Skills Help Coding Agents? An Empirical Study of Developer Interaction Histories10 Aug 2026
- 2026Branch2Skill: Efficient Skill Evolution Through Reasoning Trees9 Aug 2026
- 2026SkillSmith: Enhancing Locally Deployed Agents via Automatic Skill Construction and Evolution8 Aug 2026
- 2026SynChain: Inducing Computer-Use Agent Systems to Construct Their Own Attack Chains7 Aug 2026
- 2026FRAMES: Guarded and Dual-Objective Skill Evolution for Agents in Policy-Governed Enterprise Workflows3 Aug 2026
- 2026PATH-Bench: Path-Dependent Evaluation of Lifelong Agents2 Aug 2026
- 2026DarwinX: Evolving Agent Harnesses Through Natural Selection31 Jul 2026
- 2026AgentStream: How Well Do Self-Evolving LLM Agents Perform Under Streaming Tasks?31 Jul 2026
- 2026SkillMentor: LLM Agent Self-Evolution via Learning Blind-Spot Diagnosis29 Jul 2026
- 2026RELIC: Revealed Principles for Learning Interpretable Composable Skills in Multi-Agent Planning18 Jul 2026
- 2026From Memory to Skills: Evidence-Grounded Co-Evolution Governance for Long-Horizon LLM Agents18 Jul 2026
- 2026Dynamic Agent Skills: A Lifecycle Survey and Taxonomy of Evolving Skill Libraries11 Jul 2026
- 2026An Empirical Study of Downstream Adaptation for Agent Skills3 Jul 2026
- 2026SkillCoach: Self-Evolving Rubrics for Evaluating and Enhancing Agentic Skill-Use2 Jul 2026
- 2026COMFYCLAW: Self-Evolving Skill Harnesses for Image Generation Workflows2 Jul 2026
50 newest of 96 All 96 (JSON)
- 2026Trace2Skill: Distill Trajectory-Local Lessons into Transferable Agent Skillscited by 161
- 2026SkillOpt: Executive Strategy for Self-Evolving Agent Skillscited by 122
- 2026SkillClaw: Let Skills Evolve Collectively with Agentic Evolvercited by 76
- 2026SkillLearnBench: Benchmarking Continual Learning Methods for Agent Skill Generation on Real-World Taskscited by 45
- 2026SkillOS: Learning Skill Curation for Self-Evolving Agentscited by 45
- 2026SkillGen: Verified Inference-Time Agent Skill Synthesiscited by 29
- 2026MUSE-Autoskill: Self-Evolving Agents via Skill Creation, Memory, Management, and Evaluationcited by 23
- 2026SkillsVote: Lifecycle Governance of Agent Skills from Collection, Recommendation to Evolutioncited by 18
- 2026A Comprehensive Survey on Agent Skills: Taxonomy, Techniques, and Applicationscited by 17
- 2026Experience Compression Spectrum: Unifying Memory, Skills, and Rules in LLM Agentscited by 16
- 2026SkillMOO: Multi-Objective Optimization of Agent Skills for Software Engineeringcited by 14
- 2026SkillAudit: Ground-Truth-Free Skill Evolution via Paired Trajectory Auditingcited by 11
12 most cited of 61 All 61 (JSON)
- 2026Rep2Skill: Representation-Guided Skill Self-Evolution for LLM Agents30 Sep 2026
- 2026SKILLLITE: Evidence-Guided Malicious Skill Auditing with Compact LLMs29 Sep 2026
- 2026Beyond Skill Evolution: Self-Evolving Context Management Policies for Long-Horizon Agent Harnesses28 Sep 2026
- 2026Certified Long-Horizon Code Agent Evolution via Validation-Gated Skill Optimization26 Sep 2026
- 2026Enabling Timely Guidance before Skill Retrieval: Retaining Helpful Warm Tips in Agent Context26 Sep 2026
- 2026Analyzing and Mitigating Cost-Inefficient Behaviors in Coding Agents25 Sep 2026
- 2026GraphSkillEvo: Evolutionary Optimization of Graph-Structured Agent Skills18 Sep 2026
- 2026MOSCOPT: Mixture-of-Skills Collective Optimization for LLM Agents13 Sep 2026
- 2026COBRA-Skills: Contextual Bandit-Guided Evolution for Agent Skill Optimization10 Sep 2026
- 2026Auto-RecSys: Harnessing Autonomous Research Agents for Industry-Scale Recommender System10 Sep 2026
- 2026SkillAdam: Stable and Efficient Skill Evolution for Agents8 Sep 2026
- 2026Subagents vs Agent Skills: Executing Reusable Knowledge for Long-Horizon Agentic Tasks7 Sep 2026
12 newest of 61 All 61 (JSON)
- 2026ASDA: Automated Skill Distillation and Adaptation for Financial Reasoningcited by 5
- 2026Rewarding the Scientific Process: Process-Level Reward Modeling for Agentic Data Analysiscited by 4
- 2026CoSkill: Joint Reinforcement Learning of Reasoning and Meta-Skill Agents for Hierarchical Skill Evolutioncited by 0
- 2026CoSkill: Joint Reinforcement Learning of Reasoning and Meta-Skill Agents for Hierarchical Skill Evolution4 Sep 2026
- 2026Rewarding the Scientific Process: Process-Level Reward Modeling for Agentic Data Analysis27 Apr 2026
- 2026ASDA: Automated Skill Distillation and Adaptation for Financial Reasoning17 Mar 2026
- 2026SKILLFOUNDRY: Building Self-Evolving Agent Skill Libraries from Heterogeneous Scientific Resourcescited by 38
- 2026SkillFlow:Benchmarking Lifelong Skill Discovery and Evolution for Autonomous Agentscited by 19
- 2026From Raw Experience to Skill Consumption: A Systematic Study of Model-Generated Agent Skillscited by 18
- 2026MMSkills: Towards Multimodal Skills for General Visual Agentscited by 13
- 2026WikiSkill: Compiling Agent Experience into Persistent Knowledge for Skill Evolutioncited by 7
- 2026From Multi-Agent to Single-Agent: When Is Skill Distillation Beneficial?cited by 6
- 2026SkillEvolBench: Benchmarking the Evolution from Episodic Experience to Procedural Skillscited by 3
- 2026PILOT in the Loop: Live Self-Improvement for Long-Horizon Agentscited by 3
- 2026Test-Time Learning with an Evolving Librarycited by 2
- 2026Beyond Task Completion: A Verification-vs.-Conformance Gap in Tool-Evolving Agentscited by 1
- 2026Evidence Over Plans: Online Trajectory Verification for Skill Distillationcited by 1
- 2026Workflow Closure Is Not Scientific Closure in Auto-Research Systemscited by 1
12 most cited of 27 All 27 (JSON)
- 2026Which Skill to Distill? SGUID: Selecting a Compact Skill Bank for Model-Skill Co-Evolution8 Oct 2026
- 2026Trajectory-Guided Fault Localization for Agent Skill Evolution8 Oct 2026
- 2026SkillCome: Group Contrast Skill Optimization with Dual Memory29 Sep 2026
- 2026EASE: Behavior-Adaptive Skill Curation for Self-Evolving Agents29 Sep 2026
- 2026VideoResearcher: Self-Improving Tool Design for Long-Video Understanding17 Sep 2026
- 2026Bad Genius: Counterfactual-Guided Harness Evolution Beyond Task-Specific Shortcuts16 Sep 2026
- 2026DMRL: Document-Mediated Reinforcement Learning for Skill Optimization in Advertising Recommendation2 Sep 2026
- 2026Toward Latent Language Model Skills Steering and Optimization: An Empirical Study29 Aug 2026
- 2026iCoder-27B: Recursive AI-Led Development of Frontier Industrial Coding Model28 Aug 2026
- 2026WikiSkill: Compiling Agent Experience into Persistent Knowledge for Skill Evolution27 Aug 2026
- 2026PILOT in the Loop: Live Self-Improvement for Long-Horizon Agents27 Aug 2026
- 2026Competence, Not Accuracy: A Diagnostic for Reference-Free Judge Gates in Skill Optimization19 Aug 2026
12 newest of 27 All 27 (JSON)
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