Memento-Skills: Let Agents Design Agents
On the map: LLM agents and tool use → Agent memory systems
Abstract (arXiv)
We introduce Memento-Skills, a generalist, continually-learnable LLM agent system that functions as an agent-designing agent: it autonomously constructs, adapts, and improves task-specific agents through experience. The system is built on a memory-based reinforcement learning framework with stateful prompts, where reusable skills (stored as structured markdown files) serve as persistent, evolving memory. These skills encode both behaviour and context, enabling the agent to carry forward knowledge across interactions. Starting from simple elementary skills (like Web search and terminal operations), the agent continually improves via the Read--Write Reflective Learning mechanism introduced in Memento~2~citewang2025memento2. In the read phase, a behaviour-trainable skill router selects the most relevant skill conditioned on the current stateful prompt; in the write phase, the agent updates and expands its skill library based on new experience. This closed-loop design enables continual learning without updating LLM parameters, as all adaptation is realised through the evolution of externalised skills and prompts. Unlike prior approaches that rely on human-designed agents, Memento-Skills enables a generalist agent to design agents end-to-end for new tasks. Through iterative skill generation and refinement, the system progressively improves its own capabilities. Experiments on the General AI Assistants benchmark and Humanity's Last Exam demonstrate sustained gains, achieving 26.2% and 116.2% relative improvements in overall accuracy, respectively. Code is available at https://github.com/Memento-Teams/Memento-Skills.
Key facts. Cited by 62 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in Agent memory systems, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use. Builds on 14 of its 24 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 19 Mar 2026.
Builds on
14 of 24 references.
Closest ancestors · 2
Same direction, newest first
- 2025Memento 2: Learning by Stateful Reflective Memory27 Dec
- 2025Memento: Fine-tuning LLM Agents without Fine-tuning LLMs22 Aug
Other references · 12
- 2020Language Models are Few-Shot Learnerscited by 32,419
- 2023Judging LLM-as-a-Judge with MT-Bench and Chatbot Arenacited by 8,626
- 2025DeepSeek-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in LLMs via Reinforcement Learningcited by 6,330
- 2021Finetuned Language Models Are Zero-Shot Learnerscited by 3,780
- 2023A Survey of Large Language Modelscited by 2,576
- 2025Qwen3 Embedding: Advancing Text Embedding and Reranking Through Foundation Modelscited by 1,261
- 2023GAIA: a benchmark for General AI Assistantscited by 1,128
- 2025GEPA: Reflective Prompt Evolution Can Outperform Reinforcement Learningcited by 542
- 2025Humanity's Last Examcited by 491
- 2024DS-Agent: Automated Data Science by Empowering Large Language Models with Case-Based Reasoningcited by 125
- 2026Skill-Pro: Learning Reusable Skills from Experience via Non-Parametric PPO for LLM Agentscited by 47
- 2025Optimizing Case-Based Reasoning System for Functional Test Script Generation with Large Language Modelscited by 7
Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2026: 62.
62 papers.
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- 2026SkillLearnBench: Benchmarking Continual Learning Methods for Agent Skill Generation on Real-World Taskscited by 55
- 2026SkillRet: A Large-Scale Benchmark for Skill Retrieval in LLM Agentscited by 39
- 2026Dynamic Dual-Granularity Skill Bank for Agentic RLcited by 34
- 2026SkillFlow:Benchmarking Lifelong Skill Discovery and Evolution for Autonomous Agentscited by 25
- 2026A Comprehensive Survey on Agent Skills: Taxonomy, Techniques, and Applicationscited by 18
- 2026SkillsVote: Lifecycle Governance of Agent Skills from Collection, Recommendation to Evolutioncited by 18
- 2026OpenSkill: Open-World Self-Evolution for LLM Agentscited by 12
- 2026WikiSkill: Compiling Agent Experience into Persistent Knowledge for Skill Evolutioncited by 12
- 2026EvoAgentBench: Benchmarking Agent Self-Evolution via Ability Transfercited by 11
- 2026Skill-Use: Can LLMs Actually Use Skills in Agentic Harnesses?cited by 10
- 2026From Procedural Skills to Strategy Genes: Towards Experience-Driven Test-Time Evolutioncited by 9
- 2026EvoArena: Tracking Memory Evolution for Robust LLM Agents in Dynamic Environmentscited by 9
38 more
- 2026Agent Skill Evaluation and Evolution: Frameworks and Benchmarkscited by 8
- 2026Managing Procedural Memory in LLM Agents: Control, Adaptation, and Evaluationcited by 8
- 2026Skill Is Not Document: Query-Conditioned Compatibility for LLM Agent Skill Routingcited by 7
- 2026VideoWeaver: Evaluating and Evolving Skills for Agentic Long Video Generationcited by 7
- 2026Co-Evolving Skill Generation and Policy Optimizationcited by 7
- 2026SkillsInjector: Dynamic Skill Context Construction for LLM Agentscited by 6
- 2026Dynamic Agent Skills: A Lifecycle Survey and Taxonomy of Evolving Skill Librariescited by 6
- 2026SkillEvolBench: Benchmarking the Evolution from Episodic Experience to Procedural Skillscited by 5
- 2026Agent Skills Matter: Inferring Proprietary Skills from Execution Trajectoriescited by 4
- 2026AgentStream: How Well Do Self-Evolving LLM Agents Perform Under Streaming Tasks?cited by 4
- 2026SkillZip: Evaluation-Free Skill Compression for Self-Evolving Agents by Discovering Reusable Structurecited by 4
- 2026Web2BigTable: A Bi-Level Multi-Agent LLM System for Internet-Scale Information Search and Extractioncited by 2
- 2026Ace-Skill: Bootstrapping Multimodal Agents with Prioritized and Clustered Evolutioncited by 2
- 2026OptSkills: Learning Generalizable Optimization Skills from Problem Archetypes via Cluster-Based Distillationcited by 2
- 2026Unsupervised Skill Discovery for Agentic Data Analysiscited by 2
- 2026Learning Stateful Predictive Knowledge From Experiencecited by 2
- 2026What Is a Skill Worth? Structure-Aware Shapley Valuation of Agent Skillscited by 2
- 2026APEx: Distillation of Agent Procedural Experience for Adaptive Deep Research Question Answeringcited by 2
- 2026MetaRSI / RSI2: A Meta-Recursive Self-Improving System for Recursive Self-Improving Systems Themselvescited by 2
- 2026Agentic-imodels: Evolving agentic interpretability tools via autoresearchcited by 1
- 2026CASCADE: Case-Based Continual Adaptation for Large Language Models During Deploymentcited by 1
- 2026Skill-CMIB: Multimodal Agent Skill for Consistent Action via Conditional Multimodal Information Bottleneckcited by 1
- 2026Learning to Learn from Multimodal Experiencecited by 1
- 2026Workflow Closure Is Not Scientific Closure in Auto-Research Systemscited by 1
- 2026ESC-Skills: Discovering and Self-Evolving Skills for Emotional Support Conversationscited by 1
- 2026MaskClaw: Edge-Side Personalized Privacy Arbitration for GUI Agents with Behavior-Driven Skill Evolutioncited by 1
- 2026Learning on the Job: Continual Learning from Deployment Feedback for Frozen-Weights Agentscited by 1
- 2026ARES: Adaptive Reasoning-Effort Steering for PPA- and Cost-Aware RTL Optimization with LLM Agentscited by 1
- 2026GeoForge: Non-Parametric Self-Evolving Agents for Earth-Observation Reasoningcited by 1
- 2026MEGA: Self-Evolving Agent Optimization Infrastructure via Wisdom Graphcited by 1
- 2026COBRA-Skills: Contextual Bandit-Guided Evolution for Agent Skill Optimizationcited by 1
- 2026AgentPSO: Evolving Agent Reasoning Skill via Multi-agent Particle Swarm Optimizationcited by 0
- 2026Memory-Augmented Reinforcement Learning Agent for CAD Generationcited by 0
- 2026Residual Skill Optimization for Text-to-SQL Ensemblescited by 0
- 2026EmoDistill: Offline Emotion Skill Distillation for Language Model Agents in Adversarial Negotiationcited by 0
- 2026You Live More Than Once: Towards Hierarchical Skill Meta-Evolvingcited by 0
- 2026FRAMES: Guarded and Dual-Objective Skill Evolution for Agents in Policy-Governed Enterprise Workflowscited by 0
- 2026ContextWeave: A Real-World Workflow Benchmarkcited by 0
50 most cited of 62 All 62 (JSON)
- 2026Memento 3: Model-Based Recursive Self-Improvement through Reflective Rulebooks8 Oct 2026
- 2026A self-learning scientific agent for X-ray diffraction6 Oct 2026
- 2026EVISKILL: Grounding Skill Evolution in Replayable Evidence4 Oct 2026
- 2026Learning from Research: Toward Lifelong Agent Harness Evolution30 Sep 2026
- 2026SEABench: Benchmarking Endogenous Misalignment In Self-Evolving Agents28 Sep 2026
- 2026MemAgent: Learning to Manage Heterogeneous Memory Providers for LLM Agents26 Sep 2026
- 2026Enabling Timely Guidance before Skill Retrieval: Retaining Helpful Warm Tips in Agent Context26 Sep 2026
- 2026RLHarness: Co-evolving Procedural Skills with Reinforcement Learning for Long-horizon Multimodal Reasoning26 Sep 2026
- 2026Memory as Middleware for Self-Improving AI Agents25 Sep 2026
- 2026EvoSherlock: Towards Agentic Lifelong Evolution for Unseen Long-Tailed Security-Critical Events in Videos16 Sep 2026
- 2026COBRA-Skills: Contextual Bandit-Guided Evolution for Agent Skill Optimization10 Sep 2026
- 2026MetaRSI / RSI2: A Meta-Recursive Self-Improving System for Recursive Self-Improving Systems Themselves6 Sep 2026
38 more
- 2026APEx: Distillation of Agent Procedural Experience for Adaptive Deep Research Question Answering2 Sep 2026
- 2026SkillForge: Compositional Skill Synthesis with Verification-in-the-Loop for Generating Formally Verified Dafny Programs30 Aug 2026
- 2026Towards a Systems Foundation for Agentic Skills: Architecture, Lifecycle, and Security30 Aug 2026
- 2026WikiSkill: Compiling Agent Experience into Persistent Knowledge for Skill Evolution27 Aug 2026
- 2026SkillZip: Evaluation-Free Skill Compression for Self-Evolving Agents by Discovering Reusable Structure11 Aug 2026
- 2026MEGA: Self-Evolving Agent Optimization Infrastructure via Wisdom Graph11 Aug 2026
- 2026GeoForge: Non-Parametric Self-Evolving Agents for Earth-Observation Reasoning11 Aug 2026
- 2026ContextWeave: A Real-World Workflow Benchmark5 Aug 2026
- 2026Skill-Use: Can LLMs Actually Use Skills in Agentic Harnesses?5 Aug 2026
- 2026What Is a Skill Worth? Structure-Aware Shapley Valuation of Agent Skills5 Aug 2026
- 2026FRAMES: Guarded and Dual-Objective Skill Evolution for Agents in Policy-Governed Enterprise Workflows3 Aug 2026
- 2026AgentStream: How Well Do Self-Evolving LLM Agents Perform Under Streaming Tasks?31 Jul 2026
- 2026ARES: Adaptive Reasoning-Effort Steering for PPA- and Cost-Aware RTL Optimization with LLM Agents30 Jul 2026
- 2026Agent Skills Matter: Inferring Proprietary Skills from Execution Trajectories28 Jul 2026
- 2026Learning on the Job: Continual Learning from Deployment Feedback for Frozen-Weights Agents24 Jul 2026
- 2026Dynamic Agent Skills: A Lifecycle Survey and Taxonomy of Evolving Skill Libraries11 Jul 2026
- 2026EvoAgentBench: Benchmarking Agent Self-Evolution via Ability Transfer6 Jul 2026
- 2026Managing Procedural Memory in LLM Agents: Control, Adaptation, and Evaluation22 Jun 2026
- 2026EvoArena: Tracking Memory Evolution for Robust LLM Agents in Dynamic Environments11 Jun 2026
- 2026Agent Skill Evaluation and Evolution: Frameworks and Benchmarks9 Jun 2026
- 2026Co-Evolving Skill Generation and Policy Optimization7 Jun 2026
- 2026VideoWeaver: Evaluating and Evolving Skills for Agentic Long Video Generation6 Jun 2026
- 2026OpenSkill: Open-World Self-Evolution for LLM Agents4 Jun 2026
- 2026Unsupervised Skill Discovery for Agentic Data Analysis4 Jun 2026
- 2026Skill Is Not Document: Query-Conditioned Compatibility for LLM Agent Skill Routing2 Jun 2026
- 2026OptSkills: Learning Generalizable Optimization Skills from Problem Archetypes via Cluster-Based Distillation28 May 2026
- 2026SkillsInjector: Dynamic Skill Context Construction for LLM Agents28 May 2026
- 2026MaskClaw: Edge-Side Personalized Privacy Arbitration for GUI Agents with Behavior-Driven Skill Evolution27 May 2026
- 2026You Live More Than Once: Towards Hierarchical Skill Meta-Evolving27 May 2026
- 2026ESC-Skills: Discovering and Self-Evolving Skills for Emotional Support Conversations27 May 2026
- 2026EmoDistill: Offline Emotion Skill Distillation for Language Model Agents in Adversarial Negotiation26 May 2026
- 2026Workflow Closure Is Not Scientific Closure in Auto-Research Systems25 May 2026
- 2026SkillEvolBench: Benchmarking the Evolution from Episodic Experience to Procedural Skills22 May 2026
- 2026Residual Skill Optimization for Text-to-SQL Ensembles20 May 2026
- 2026Learning Stateful Predictive Knowledge From Experience19 May 2026
- 2026Memory-Augmented Reinforcement Learning Agent for CAD Generation19 May 2026
- 2026SkillsVote: Lifecycle Governance of Agent Skills from Collection, Recommendation to Evolution18 May 2026
- 2026Learning to Learn from Multimodal Experience16 May 2026
50 newest of 62 All 62 (JSON)
- 2026SkillLearnBench: Benchmarking Continual Learning Methods for Agent Skill Generation on Real-World Taskscited by 55
- 2026SkillRet: A Large-Scale Benchmark for Skill Retrieval in LLM Agentscited by 39
- 2026Dynamic Dual-Granularity Skill Bank for Agentic RLcited by 34
- 2026A Comprehensive Survey on Agent Skills: Taxonomy, Techniques, and Applicationscited by 18
- 2026SkillsVote: Lifecycle Governance of Agent Skills from Collection, Recommendation to Evolutioncited by 18
- 2026OpenSkill: Open-World Self-Evolution for LLM Agentscited by 12
- 2026EvoAgentBench: Benchmarking Agent Self-Evolution via Ability Transfercited by 11
- 2026Skill-Use: Can LLMs Actually Use Skills in Agentic Harnesses?cited by 10
- 2026EvoArena: Tracking Memory Evolution for Robust LLM Agents in Dynamic Environmentscited by 9
- 2026Agent Skill Evaluation and Evolution: Frameworks and Benchmarkscited by 8
- 2026Managing Procedural Memory in LLM Agents: Control, Adaptation, and Evaluationcited by 8
- 2026Skill Is Not Document: Query-Conditioned Compatibility for LLM Agent Skill Routingcited by 7
12 most cited of 37 All 37 (JSON)
- 2026A self-learning scientific agent for X-ray diffraction6 Oct 2026
- 2026EVISKILL: Grounding Skill Evolution in Replayable Evidence4 Oct 2026
- 2026Learning from Research: Toward Lifelong Agent Harness Evolution30 Sep 2026
- 2026SEABench: Benchmarking Endogenous Misalignment In Self-Evolving Agents28 Sep 2026
- 2026MemAgent: Learning to Manage Heterogeneous Memory Providers for LLM Agents26 Sep 2026
- 2026Enabling Timely Guidance before Skill Retrieval: Retaining Helpful Warm Tips in Agent Context26 Sep 2026
- 2026EvoSherlock: Towards Agentic Lifelong Evolution for Unseen Long-Tailed Security-Critical Events in Videos16 Sep 2026
- 2026COBRA-Skills: Contextual Bandit-Guided Evolution for Agent Skill Optimization10 Sep 2026
- 2026APEx: Distillation of Agent Procedural Experience for Adaptive Deep Research Question Answering2 Sep 2026
- 2026SkillForge: Compositional Skill Synthesis with Verification-in-the-Loop for Generating Formally Verified Dafny Programs30 Aug 2026
- 2026Towards a Systems Foundation for Agentic Skills: Architecture, Lifecycle, and Security30 Aug 2026
- 2026MEGA: Self-Evolving Agent Optimization Infrastructure via Wisdom Graph11 Aug 2026
12 newest of 37 All 37 (JSON)
- 2026ARES: Adaptive Reasoning-Effort Steering for PPA- and Cost-Aware RTL Optimization with LLM Agentscited by 1
- 2026GeoForge: Non-Parametric Self-Evolving Agents for Earth-Observation Reasoningcited by 1
- 2026AgentPSO: Evolving Agent Reasoning Skill via Multi-agent Particle Swarm Optimizationcited by 0
- 2026RLHarness: Co-evolving Procedural Skills with Reinforcement Learning for Long-horizon Multimodal Reasoningcited by 0
- 2026RLHarness: Co-evolving Procedural Skills with Reinforcement Learning for Long-horizon Multimodal Reasoning26 Sep 2026
- 2026GeoForge: Non-Parametric Self-Evolving Agents for Earth-Observation Reasoning11 Aug 2026
- 2026ARES: Adaptive Reasoning-Effort Steering for PPA- and Cost-Aware RTL Optimization with LLM Agents30 Jul 2026
- 2026AgentPSO: Evolving Agent Reasoning Skill via Multi-agent Particle Swarm Optimization9 May 2026
- 2026SkillFlow:Benchmarking Lifelong Skill Discovery and Evolution for Autonomous Agentscited by 25
- 2026WikiSkill: Compiling Agent Experience into Persistent Knowledge for Skill Evolutioncited by 12
- 2026From Procedural Skills to Strategy Genes: Towards Experience-Driven Test-Time Evolutioncited by 9
- 2026Co-Evolving Skill Generation and Policy Optimizationcited by 7
- 2026SkillEvolBench: Benchmarking the Evolution from Episodic Experience to Procedural Skillscited by 5
- 2026Agent Skills Matter: Inferring Proprietary Skills from Execution Trajectoriescited by 4
- 2026SkillZip: Evaluation-Free Skill Compression for Self-Evolving Agents by Discovering Reusable Structurecited by 4
- 2026Ace-Skill: Bootstrapping Multimodal Agents with Prioritized and Clustered Evolutioncited by 2
- 2026OptSkills: Learning Generalizable Optimization Skills from Problem Archetypes via Cluster-Based Distillationcited by 2
- 2026Learning Stateful Predictive Knowledge From Experiencecited by 2
- 2026What Is a Skill Worth? Structure-Aware Shapley Valuation of Agent Skillscited by 2
- 2026MetaRSI / RSI2: A Meta-Recursive Self-Improving System for Recursive Self-Improving Systems Themselvescited by 2
12 most cited of 20 All 20 (JSON)
- 2026Memory as Middleware for Self-Improving AI Agents25 Sep 2026
- 2026MetaRSI / RSI2: A Meta-Recursive Self-Improving System for Recursive Self-Improving Systems Themselves6 Sep 2026
- 2026WikiSkill: Compiling Agent Experience into Persistent Knowledge for Skill Evolution27 Aug 2026
- 2026SkillZip: Evaluation-Free Skill Compression for Self-Evolving Agents by Discovering Reusable Structure11 Aug 2026
- 2026ContextWeave: A Real-World Workflow Benchmark5 Aug 2026
- 2026What Is a Skill Worth? Structure-Aware Shapley Valuation of Agent Skills5 Aug 2026
- 2026Agent Skills Matter: Inferring Proprietary Skills from Execution Trajectories28 Jul 2026
- 2026Learning on the Job: Continual Learning from Deployment Feedback for Frozen-Weights Agents24 Jul 2026
- 2026Co-Evolving Skill Generation and Policy Optimization7 Jun 2026
- 2026OptSkills: Learning Generalizable Optimization Skills from Problem Archetypes via Cluster-Based Distillation28 May 2026
- 2026ESC-Skills: Discovering and Self-Evolving Skills for Emotional Support Conversations27 May 2026
- 2026Workflow Closure Is Not Scientific Closure in Auto-Research Systems25 May 2026
12 newest of 20 All 20 (JSON)
Similar, not cited
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- 2026MemSkill: Learning and Evolving Memory Skills for Self-Evolving Agents
- 2025Memento No More: Coaching AI Agents to Master Multiple Tasks via Hints Internalization
- 2026SkillOS: Learning Skill Curation for Self-Evolving Agents
- 2026MASkills: Continual Skills Optimization for Multi-Agent LLM Systems
- 2026ContinualSkillBench: Can LLM Agents Truly Evolve Their Capabilities?
- 2026Memory as a Controlled Process: Learned Adaptive Memory Management for LLM Agents
- 2026SkillMaster: Toward Autonomous Skill Mastery in LLM Agents
- 2026MUSE-Autoskill: Self-Evolving Agents via Skill Creation, Memory, Management, and Evaluation