mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

Memento-Skills: Let Agents Design Agents

arXiv 2603.18743 ↗First posted 19 Mar 2026cs.AI cs.CL cs.LGcited by 62

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

  1. 2025Memento 2: Learning by Stateful Reflective Memory27 Dec
  2. 2025Memento: Fine-tuning LLM Agents without Fine-tuning LLMs22 Aug

Other references · 12

  1. 2020Language Models are Few-Shot Learnerscited by 32,419
  2. 2023Judging LLM-as-a-Judge with MT-Bench and Chatbot Arenacited by 8,626
  3. 2025DeepSeek-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in LLMs via Reinforcement Learningcited by 6,330
  4. 2021Finetuned Language Models Are Zero-Shot Learnerscited by 3,780
  5. 2023A Survey of Large Language Modelscited by 2,576
  6. 2025Qwen3 Embedding: Advancing Text Embedding and Reranking Through Foundation Modelscited by 1,261
  7. 2023GAIA: a benchmark for General AI Assistantscited by 1,128
  8. 2025GEPA: Reflective Prompt Evolution Can Outperform Reinforcement Learningcited by 542
  9. 2025Humanity's Last Examcited by 491
  10. 2024DS-Agent: Automated Data Science by Empowering Large Language Models with Case-Based Reasoningcited by 125
  11. 2026Skill-Pro: Learning Reusable Skills from Experience via Non-Parametric PPO for LLM Agentscited by 47
  12. 2025Optimizing Case-Based Reasoning System for Functional Test Script Generation with Large Language Modelscited by 7

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 62.

62 papers.

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  1. 2026SkillLearnBench: Benchmarking Continual Learning Methods for Agent Skill Generation on Real-World Taskscited by 55
  2. 2026SkillRet: A Large-Scale Benchmark for Skill Retrieval in LLM Agentscited by 39
  3. 2026Dynamic Dual-Granularity Skill Bank for Agentic RLcited by 34
  4. 2026SkillFlow:Benchmarking Lifelong Skill Discovery and Evolution for Autonomous Agentscited by 25
  5. 2026A Comprehensive Survey on Agent Skills: Taxonomy, Techniques, and Applicationscited by 18
  6. 2026SkillsVote: Lifecycle Governance of Agent Skills from Collection, Recommendation to Evolutioncited by 18
  7. 2026OpenSkill: Open-World Self-Evolution for LLM Agentscited by 12
  8. 2026WikiSkill: Compiling Agent Experience into Persistent Knowledge for Skill Evolutioncited by 12
  9. 2026EvoAgentBench: Benchmarking Agent Self-Evolution via Ability Transfercited by 11
  10. 2026Skill-Use: Can LLMs Actually Use Skills in Agentic Harnesses?cited by 10
  11. 2026From Procedural Skills to Strategy Genes: Towards Experience-Driven Test-Time Evolutioncited by 9
  12. 2026EvoArena: Tracking Memory Evolution for Robust LLM Agents in Dynamic Environmentscited by 9
38 more
  1. 2026Agent Skill Evaluation and Evolution: Frameworks and Benchmarkscited by 8
  2. 2026Managing Procedural Memory in LLM Agents: Control, Adaptation, and Evaluationcited by 8
  3. 2026Skill Is Not Document: Query-Conditioned Compatibility for LLM Agent Skill Routingcited by 7
  4. 2026VideoWeaver: Evaluating and Evolving Skills for Agentic Long Video Generationcited by 7
  5. 2026Co-Evolving Skill Generation and Policy Optimizationcited by 7
  6. 2026SkillsInjector: Dynamic Skill Context Construction for LLM Agentscited by 6
  7. 2026Dynamic Agent Skills: A Lifecycle Survey and Taxonomy of Evolving Skill Librariescited by 6
  8. 2026SkillEvolBench: Benchmarking the Evolution from Episodic Experience to Procedural Skillscited by 5
  9. 2026Agent Skills Matter: Inferring Proprietary Skills from Execution Trajectoriescited by 4
  10. 2026AgentStream: How Well Do Self-Evolving LLM Agents Perform Under Streaming Tasks?cited by 4
  11. 2026SkillZip: Evaluation-Free Skill Compression for Self-Evolving Agents by Discovering Reusable Structurecited by 4
  12. 2026Web2BigTable: A Bi-Level Multi-Agent LLM System for Internet-Scale Information Search and Extractioncited by 2
  13. 2026Ace-Skill: Bootstrapping Multimodal Agents with Prioritized and Clustered Evolutioncited by 2
  14. 2026OptSkills: Learning Generalizable Optimization Skills from Problem Archetypes via Cluster-Based Distillationcited by 2
  15. 2026Unsupervised Skill Discovery for Agentic Data Analysiscited by 2
  16. 2026Learning Stateful Predictive Knowledge From Experiencecited by 2
  17. 2026What Is a Skill Worth? Structure-Aware Shapley Valuation of Agent Skillscited by 2
  18. 2026APEx: Distillation of Agent Procedural Experience for Adaptive Deep Research Question Answeringcited by 2
  19. 2026MetaRSI / RSI2: A Meta-Recursive Self-Improving System for Recursive Self-Improving Systems Themselvescited by 2
  20. 2026Agentic-imodels: Evolving agentic interpretability tools via autoresearchcited by 1
  21. 2026CASCADE: Case-Based Continual Adaptation for Large Language Models During Deploymentcited by 1
  22. 2026Skill-CMIB: Multimodal Agent Skill for Consistent Action via Conditional Multimodal Information Bottleneckcited by 1
  23. 2026Learning to Learn from Multimodal Experiencecited by 1
  24. 2026Workflow Closure Is Not Scientific Closure in Auto-Research Systemscited by 1
  25. 2026ESC-Skills: Discovering and Self-Evolving Skills for Emotional Support Conversationscited by 1
  26. 2026MaskClaw: Edge-Side Personalized Privacy Arbitration for GUI Agents with Behavior-Driven Skill Evolutioncited by 1
  27. 2026Learning on the Job: Continual Learning from Deployment Feedback for Frozen-Weights Agentscited by 1
  28. 2026ARES: Adaptive Reasoning-Effort Steering for PPA- and Cost-Aware RTL Optimization with LLM Agentscited by 1
  29. 2026GeoForge: Non-Parametric Self-Evolving Agents for Earth-Observation Reasoningcited by 1
  30. 2026MEGA: Self-Evolving Agent Optimization Infrastructure via Wisdom Graphcited by 1
  31. 2026COBRA-Skills: Contextual Bandit-Guided Evolution for Agent Skill Optimizationcited by 1
  32. 2026AgentPSO: Evolving Agent Reasoning Skill via Multi-agent Particle Swarm Optimizationcited by 0
  33. 2026Memory-Augmented Reinforcement Learning Agent for CAD Generationcited by 0
  34. 2026Residual Skill Optimization for Text-to-SQL Ensemblescited by 0
  35. 2026EmoDistill: Offline Emotion Skill Distillation for Language Model Agents in Adversarial Negotiationcited by 0
  36. 2026You Live More Than Once: Towards Hierarchical Skill Meta-Evolvingcited by 0
  37. 2026FRAMES: Guarded and Dual-Objective Skill Evolution for Agents in Policy-Governed Enterprise Workflowscited by 0
  38. 2026ContextWeave: A Real-World Workflow Benchmarkcited by 0

50 most cited of 62 All 62 (JSON)

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2026MemSkill: Learning and Evolving Memory Skills for Self-Evolving Agents
  2. 2025Memento No More: Coaching AI Agents to Master Multiple Tasks via Hints Internalization
  3. 2026SkillOS: Learning Skill Curation for Self-Evolving Agents
  4. 2026MASkills: Continual Skills Optimization for Multi-Agent LLM Systems
  5. 2026ContinualSkillBench: Can LLM Agents Truly Evolve Their Capabilities?
  6. 2026Memory as a Controlled Process: Learned Adaptive Memory Management for LLM Agents
  7. 2026SkillMaster: Toward Autonomous Skill Mastery in LLM Agents
  8. 2026MUSE-Autoskill: Self-Evolving Agents via Skill Creation, Memory, Management, and Evaluation