mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

EvoSkill: Automated Skill Discovery for Multi-Agent Systems

arXiv 2603.02766 ↗First posted 3 Mar 2026cs.AI cs.MAcited by 96

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

  1. 2023Self-Refine: Iterative Refinement with Self-Feedbackcited by 3,317
  2. 2023Voyager: An Open-Ended Embodied Agent with Large Language Modelscited by 2,081
  3. 2025BrowseComp: A Simple Yet Challenging Benchmark for Browsing Agentscited by 616
  4. 2025GEPA: Reflective Prompt Evolution Can Outperform Reinforcement Learningcited by 449
  5. 2024Foundational Autoraters: Taming Large Language Models for Better Automatic Evaluationcited by 72
  6. 2025SealQA: Raising the Bar for Reasoning in Search-Augmented Language Modelscited by 65
  7. 2025Feedback Descent: Open-Ended Text Optimization via Pairwise Comparisoncited by 42
  8. 2026ROMA: Recursive Open Meta-Agent Framework for Long-Horizon Multi-Agent Systemscited by 3

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 96.

96 papers.

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  1. 2026Trace2Skill: Distill Trajectory-Local Lessons into Transferable Agent Skillscited by 161
  2. 2026SkillOpt: Executive Strategy for Self-Evolving Agent Skillscited by 122
  3. 2026SkillClaw: Let Skills Evolve Collectively with Agentic Evolvercited by 76
  4. 2026SkillLearnBench: Benchmarking Continual Learning Methods for Agent Skill Generation on Real-World Taskscited by 45
  5. 2026SkillOS: Learning Skill Curation for Self-Evolving Agentscited by 45
  6. 2026SKILLFOUNDRY: Building Self-Evolving Agent Skill Libraries from Heterogeneous Scientific Resourcescited by 38
  7. 2026SkillGen: Verified Inference-Time Agent Skill Synthesiscited by 29
  8. 2026MUSE-Autoskill: Self-Evolving Agents via Skill Creation, Memory, Management, and Evaluationcited by 23
  9. 2026SkillFlow:Benchmarking Lifelong Skill Discovery and Evolution for Autonomous Agentscited by 19
  10. 2026SkillsVote: Lifecycle Governance of Agent Skills from Collection, Recommendation to Evolutioncited by 18
  11. 2026From Raw Experience to Skill Consumption: A Systematic Study of Model-Generated Agent Skillscited by 18
  12. 2026A Comprehensive Survey on Agent Skills: Taxonomy, Techniques, and Applicationscited by 17
38 more
  1. 2026Experience Compression Spectrum: Unifying Memory, Skills, and Rules in LLM Agentscited by 16
  2. 2026SkillMOO: Multi-Objective Optimization of Agent Skills for Software Engineeringcited by 14
  3. 2026MMSkills: Towards Multimodal Skills for General Visual Agentscited by 13
  4. 2026SkillAudit: Ground-Truth-Free Skill Evolution via Paired Trajectory Auditingcited by 11
  5. 2026SkillGraph: Self-Evolving Multi-Agent Collaboration with Multimodal Graph Topologycited by 8
  6. 2026Managing Procedural Memory in LLM Agents: Control, Adaptation, and Evaluationcited by 8
  7. 2026SkillCoach: Self-Evolving Rubrics for Evaluating and Enhancing Agentic Skill-Usecited by 7
  8. 2026WikiSkill: Compiling Agent Experience into Persistent Knowledge for Skill Evolutioncited by 7
  9. 2026ABSTRAL: Automatic Design of Multi-Agent Systems Through Iterative Refinement and Topology Optimizationcited by 6
  10. 2026From Multi-Agent to Single-Agent: When Is Skill Distillation Beneficial?cited by 6
  11. 2026SkillLens: Adaptive Multi-Granularity Skill Reuse for Cost-Efficient LLM Agentscited by 6
  12. 2026SkillFlow: Flow-Driven Recursive Skill Evolution for Agentic Orchestrationcited by 6
  13. 2026CODESKILL: Learning Self-Evolving Skills for Coding Agentscited by 6
  14. 2026Dynamic Agent Skills: A Lifecycle Survey and Taxonomy of Evolving Skill Librariescited by 6
  15. 2026ASDA: Automated Skill Distillation and Adaptation for Financial Reasoningcited by 5
  16. 2026Skill0.5: Joint Skill Internalization and Utilization for Out-of-Distribution Generalization in Agentic Reinforcement Learningcited by 5
  17. 2026VideoWeaver: Evaluating and Evolving Skills for Agentic Long Video Generationcited by 5
  18. 2026COMFYCLAW: Self-Evolving Skill Harnesses for Image Generation Workflowscited by 5
  19. 2026DarwinX: Evolving Agent Harnesses Through Natural Selectioncited by 5
  20. 2026ClawTrace: Cost-Aware Tracing for LLM Agent Skill Distillationcited by 4
  21. 2026Rewarding the Scientific Process: Process-Level Reward Modeling for Agentic Data Analysiscited by 4
  22. 2026OpenSkillEval: Automatically Auditing the Open Skill Ecosystem for LLM Agentscited by 4
  23. 2026SkillSmith: Co-Evolving Skills and Tools for Self-Improving Agent Systemscited by 4
  24. 2026Self-Evolving Agents as Dynamic Graph Transformation: A Survey and New Perspectivecited by 4
  25. 2026SkillMAS: Skill Co-Evolution with LLM-based Multi-Agent Systemcited by 3
  26. 2026SkillEvolBench: Benchmarking the Evolution from Episodic Experience to Procedural Skillscited by 3
  27. 2026PILOT in the Loop: Live Self-Improvement for Long-Horizon Agentscited by 3
  28. 2026MIND-Skill: Quality-Guaranteed Skill Generation via Multi-Agent Induction and Deductioncited by 2
  29. 2026Test-Time Learning with an Evolving Librarycited by 2
  30. 2026Unsupervised Skill Discovery for Agentic Data Analysiscited by 2
  31. 2026OpenClaw-Skill: Collective Skill Tree Search for Agentic Large Language Modelscited by 2
  32. 2026Hierarchical Experimentalist Agentscited by 2
  33. 2026From Memory to Skills: Evidence-Grounded Co-Evolution Governance for Long-Horizon LLM Agentscited by 2
  34. 2026AgentStream: How Well Do Self-Evolving LLM Agents Perform Under Streaming Tasks?cited by 2
  35. 2026SkillAdam: Stable and Efficient Skill Evolution for Agentscited by 2
  36. 2026Beyond Task Completion: A Verification-vs.-Conformance Gap in Tool-Evolving Agentscited by 1
  37. 2026Agentic-imodels: Evolving agentic interpretability tools via autoresearchcited by 1
  38. 2026Safactory: A Scalable Agentic Infrastructure for Training Trustworthy Autonomous Intelligencecited by 1

50 most cited of 96 All 96 (JSON)

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  1. 2026SkillComposer: Learning to Evolve Agent Skills for Specification and Generalization
  2. 2026Agent Skill Evaluation and Evolution: Frameworks and Benchmarks
  3. 2026SkillFocus: Evolving Agent Skills via Capability Decomposition
  4. 2026SkillProx: Self-Evolving Agent Skills via Proximal Textual Gradient Descent
  5. 2026MetaSkill-Evolve: Recursive Self-Improvement of LLM Agents via Two-Timescale Meta-Skill Evolution
  6. 2025AlignEvoSkill: Towards Knowledge-Aware and Task-Aligned Agent Skill Evolution
  7. 2026CoEvoSkills: Self-Evolving Agent Skills via Co-Evolutionary Verification
  8. 2026SkillRevise: Improving LLM-Authored Agent Skills via Trace-Conditioned Skill Revision