SkillX: Automatically Constructing Skill Knowledge Bases for Agents
On the map: LLM agents and tool use → Agent skill learning and evolution
Abstract (arXiv)
Learning from experience is critical for building capable large language model (LLM) agents, yet prevailing self-evolving paradigms remain inefficient: agents learn in isolation, repeatedly rediscover similar behaviors from limited experience, resulting in redundant exploration and poor generalization. To address this problem, we propose SkillX, a fully automated framework for constructing a plug-and-play skill knowledge base that can be reused across agents and environments. SkillX operates through a fully automated pipeline built on three synergistic innovations: textit(i) Multi-Level Skills Design, which distills raw trajectories into three-tiered hierarchy of strategic plans, functional skills, and atomic skills; textit(ii) Iterative Skills Refinement, which automatically revises skills based on execution feedback to continuously improve library quality; and textit(iii) Exploratory Skills Expansion, which proactively generates and validates novel skills to expand coverage beyond seed training data. Using a strong backbone agent (GLM-4.6), we automatically build a reusable skill library and evaluate its transferability on challenging long-horizon, user-interactive benchmarks, including AppWorld, BFCL-v3, and τ2-Bench. Experiments show that SkillKB consistently improves task success and execution efficiency when plugged into weaker base agents, highlighting the importance of structured, hierarchical experience representations for generalizable agent learning. Our code will be publicly available soon at https://github.com/zjunlp/SkillX.
Key facts. Cited by 69 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 46 of its 62 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 6 Apr 2026.
Builds on
46 of 62 references.
Closest ancestors · 4
Same direction, newest first
- 2026Trace2Skill: Distill Trajectory-Local Lessons into Transferable Agent Skills26 Mar
- 2026SkillRouter: Skill Routing for LLM Agents at Scale23 Mar
- 2026SkillsBench: Benchmarking How Well Agent Skills Work Across Diverse Tasks13 Feb
- 2025Reinforcement Learning for Self-Improving Agent with Skill Library18 Dec
Other references · 42
- 2023Voyager: An Open-Ended Embodied Agent with Large Language Modelscited by 2,081
- 2023WebArena: A Realistic Web Environment for Building Autonomous Agentscited by 1,908
- 2024τ-bench: A Benchmark for Tool-Agent-User Interaction in Real-World Domainscited by 1,280
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- 2025Qwen3 Embedding: Advancing Text Embedding and Reranking Through Foundation Modelscited by 1,175
- 2023GAIA: a benchmark for General AI Assistantscited by 1,084
- 2025Does Reinforcement Learning Really Incentivize Reasoning Capacity in LLMs Beyond the Base Model?cited by 948
- 2023ExpeL: LLM Agents Are Experiential Learnerscited by 814
- 2025AlphaEvolve: A coding agent for scientific and algorithmic discoverycited by 763
- 2025DeepSeek-V3.2: Pushing the Frontier of Open Large Language Modelscited by 755
- 2025τ2-Bench: Evaluating Conversational Agents in a Dual-Control Environmentcited by 558
- 2022Precise Zero-Shot Dense Retrieval without Relevance Labelscited by 508
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- 2025Agentic Context Engineering: Evolving Contexts for Self-Improving Language Modelscited by 349
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- 2025Memory in the Age of AI Agentscited by 285
- 2025ReasoningBank: Scaling Agent Self-Evolving with Reasoning Memorycited by 253
- 2023Synapse: Trajectory-as-Exemplar Prompting with Memory for Computer Controlcited by 180
- 2025A Comprehensive Survey of Self-Evolving AI Agents: A New Paradigm Bridging Foundation Models and Lifelong Agentic Systemscited by 177
- 2026MemSkill: Learning and Evolving Memory Skills for Self-Evolving Agentscited by 129
- 2026AutoSkill: Experience-Driven Lifelong Learning via Skill Self-Evolutioncited by 105
- 2025Inducing Programmatic Skills for Agentic Taskscited by 103
- 2025Agent KB: Leveraging Cross-Domain Experience for Agentic Problem Solvingcited by 90
- 2025Memp: Exploring Agent Procedural Memorycited by 88
- 2025The Tool Decathlon: Benchmarking Language Agents for Diverse, Realistic, and Long-Horizon Task Executioncited by 73
- 2025Remember Me, Refine Me: A Dynamic Procedural Memory Framework for Experience-Driven Agent Evolutioncited by 65
- 2025ML-Master: Towards AI-for-AI via Integration of Exploration and Reasoningcited by 57
- 2025Training-Free Group Relative Policy Optimizationcited by 53
- 2025FLEX: Continuous Agent Evolution via Forward Learning from Experiencecited by 51
- 2025TaskCraft: Automated Generation of Agentic Taskscited by 46
- 2025GenEnv: Difficulty-Aligned Co-Evolution Between LLM Agents and Environment Simulatorscited by 34
- 2026When Single-Agent with Skills Replace Multi-Agent Systems and When They Failcited by 34
- 2026SkillOrchestra: Learning to Route Agents via Skill Transfercited by 22
- 2025AutoMind: Adaptive Knowledgeable Agent for Automated Data Sciencecited by 20
- 2026Beyond Static Summarization: Proactive Memory Extraction for LLM Agentscited by 20
- 2025Scaling Synthetic Task Generation for Agents via Explorationcited by 19
- 2025MemR3: Memory Retrieval via Reflective Reasoning for LLM Agentscited by 17
- 2025Scaling Generalist Data-Analytic Agentscited by 11
- 2026MemGovern: Enhancing Code Agents through Learning from Governed Human Experiencescited by 10
- 2025CuES: A Curiosity-driven and Environment-grounded Synthesis Framework for Agentic RLcited by 8
- 2025Knowledge Augmented Complex Problem Solving with Large Language Models: A Surveycited by 6
- 2026Distilling Feedback into Memory-as-a-Toolcited by 2
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Citing papers per year: 2026: 69.
69 papers.
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- 2026SkillOpt: Executive Strategy for Self-Evolving Agent Skillscited by 122
- 2026SkillGen: Verified Inference-Time Agent Skill Synthesiscited by 29
- 2026SkillRevise: Improving LLM-Authored Agent Skills via Trace-Conditioned Skill Revisioncited by 21
- 2026From Context to Skills: Can Language Models Learn from Context Skillfully?cited by 19
- 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
- 2026From Skill Text to Skill Structure: The Scheduling-Structural-Logical Representation for Agent Skillscited by 15
- 2026SkillSafetyBench: Evaluating Agent Safety under Skill-Facing Attack Surfacescited by 15
- 2026MMSkills: Towards Multimodal Skills for General Visual Agentscited by 13
- 2026MetaSkill-Evolve: Recursive Self-Improvement of LLM Agents via Two-Timescale Meta-Skill Evolutioncited by 12
- 2026GRASP: Gated Regression-Aware Skill Proposer for Self-Improving LLM Agentscited by 10
- 2026Managing Procedural Memory in LLM Agents: Control, Adaptation, and Evaluationcited by 8
38 more
- 2026Corpus2Skill: Distilling Enterprise Knowledge into Navigable Agent Skills for QA and RAGcited by 6
- 2026SkillFlow: Flow-Driven Recursive Skill Evolution for Agentic Orchestrationcited by 6
- 2026Dynamic Agent Skills: A Lifecycle Survey and Taxonomy of Evolving Skill Librariescited by 6
- 2026Skill Self-Play: Pushing the Frontier of LLM Capability with Co-Evolving Skillscited by 6
- 2026π-Bench: Evaluating Proactive Personal Assistant Agents in Long-Horizon Workflowscited by 5
- 2026Skill0.5: Joint Skill Internalization and Utilization for Out-of-Distribution Generalization in Agentic Reinforcement Learningcited by 5
- 2026Co-Evolving Skill Generation and Policy Optimizationcited by 5
- 2026Generative Skill Composition for LLM Agentscited by 5
- 2026SkillSmith: Co-Evolving Skills and Tools for Self-Improving Agent Systemscited by 4
- 2026Agent Skills Matter: Inferring Proprietary Skills from Execution Trajectoriescited by 4
- 2026SkillEvolBench: Benchmarking the Evolution from Episodic Experience to Procedural Skillscited by 3
- 2026ColluSkill: Adversarial Cross-Skill Composition for Evading Agent Skill Scannerscited by 3
- 2026MIND-Skill: Quality-Guaranteed Skill Generation via Multi-Agent Induction and Deductioncited by 2
- 2026Ace-Skill: Bootstrapping Multimodal Agents with Prioritized and Clustered Evolutioncited by 2
- 2026Online Skill Learning for Web Agents via State-Grounded Dynamic Retrievalcited by 2
- 2026SkillComposer: Learning to Evolve Agent Skills for Specification and Generalizationcited by 2
- 2026Unsupervised Skill Discovery for Agentic Data Analysiscited by 2
- 2026RedAct: Redacting Agent Capability Traces for Procedural Skill Protectioncited by 2
- 2026SkillWiki: A Living Knowledge Infrastructure for Agent Skillscited by 2
- 2026Hierarchical Experimentalist Agentscited by 2
- 2026SKILL-KD: Contrastive Skill Distillation for LLM Agentscited by 2
- 2026SkillReason: Reasoning-Enhanced Agent Skill Retrieval for Implicit User Requestscited by 2
- 2026Demystifying Agent Skills: Why They Work-Until They Don'tcited by 2
- 2026Evidence Over Plans: Online Trajectory Verification for Skill Distillationcited by 1
- 2026Maestro: Reinforcement Learning to Orchestrate Hierarchical Model-Skill Ensemblescited by 1
- 2026Rethinking Memory as Continuously Evolving Connectivitycited by 1
- 2026Skill or Skip? Learning Selective Skill Invocation in Agentic Tasks via Dual-Granularity Preference Learningcited by 1
- 2026Inside the Skill Market: From Software Engineering Activities to Reusable Agent Skillscited by 1
- 2026EvoClawBench: Can Agents Learn Reusable Skills from Their Own Runs?cited by 1
- 2026HiSkill: Empowering LLM Agents with Hierarchical Skill Graphscited by 1
- 2026Rethinking Self-Evolution: A Constrained Exploration-Exploitation Process for Mitigating Skill Overfittingcited by 1
- 2026Progressive Agent Skill Generation via Reinforcement Learningcited by 1
- 2026MERA: Model Evolution and Routing with Skill Adaptation for Agentic Systems at Scalecited by 1
- 2026Graph Engineering in the Era of LLM Agents: From Individual Intelligence to System Intelligencecited by 1
- 2026You Live More Than Once: Towards Hierarchical Skill Meta-Evolvingcited by 0
- 2026Workflow-to-Skill: Skill Creation via Routing-Workflow-Semantics-Attachments Decompositioncited by 0
- 2026Beyond Rubrics: Exploration-Guided Evaluation Skills for Reward Modelingcited by 0
- 2026SkillChain: Closing the Loop on Skill Evolution for Image-Based E-Commerce AI Assistantscited by 0
50 most cited of 69 All 69 (JSON)
- 2026Universal Textual Teaching for LLMs8 Oct 2026
- 2026SkillSpec: Consensus-Gated Agent Skill Evolution via Representation Specialization30 Sep 2026
- 2026From Learner Behavior to Reusable Skills for Effective and Efficient Learner Simulation29 Sep 2026
- 2026EASE: Behavior-Adaptive Skill Curation for Self-Evolving Agents29 Sep 2026
- 2026GenMem: Generative Symbolic Memory for Self-Evolving Harness28 Sep 2026
- 2026TTSE: A Two-Track Online Self-Evolution Framework21 Sep 2026
- 2026GraphSkillEvo: Evolutionary Optimization of Graph-Structured Agent Skills18 Sep 2026
- 2026Subagents vs Agent Skills: Executing Reusable Knowledge for Long-Horizon Agentic Tasks7 Sep 2026
- 2026AgentLeak: Cloning Stronger LLM Agent Capabilities onto Weaker Agents Beyond Skill Stealing7 Sep 2026
- 2026DMRL: Document-Mediated Reinforcement Learning for Skill Optimization in Advertising Recommendation2 Sep 2026
- 2026Towards a Systems Foundation for Agentic Skills: Architecture, Lifecycle, and Security30 Aug 2026
- 2026STAGE: Stateful Translation to Agentic Graph Execution with Policy-Scoped Context and Deterministic Control23 Aug 2026
38 more
- 2026Graph Engineering in the Era of LLM Agents: From Individual Intelligence to System Intelligence21 Aug 2026
- 2026Competence, Not Accuracy: A Diagnostic for Reference-Free Judge Gates in Skill Optimization19 Aug 2026
- 2026Demystifying Agent Skills: Why They Work-Until They Don't14 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
- 2026MERA: Model Evolution and Routing with Skill Adaptation for Agentic Systems at Scale11 Aug 2026
- 2026ColluSkill: Adversarial Cross-Skill Composition for Evading Agent Skill Scanners10 Aug 2026
- 2026SkillReason: Reasoning-Enhanced Agent Skill Retrieval for Implicit User Requests9 Aug 2026
- 2026SkillSmith: Enhancing Locally Deployed Agents via Automatic Skill Construction and Evolution8 Aug 2026
- 2026ToolLIFT: Lifting Tool-Specific Trajectories into Function-Level Graphs for Generalizable Tool Planning4 Aug 2026
- 2026FRAMES: Guarded and Dual-Objective Skill Evolution for Agents in Policy-Governed Enterprise Workflows3 Aug 2026
- 2026Progressive Agent Skill Generation via Reinforcement Learning3 Aug 2026
- 2026SKILL-KD: Contrastive Skill Distillation for LLM Agents30 Jul 2026
- 2026Rethinking Self-Evolution: A Constrained Exploration-Exploitation Process for Mitigating Skill Overfitting29 Jul 2026
- 2026HiSkill: Empowering LLM Agents with Hierarchical Skill Graphs28 Jul 2026
- 2026Agent Skills Matter: Inferring Proprietary Skills from Execution Trajectories28 Jul 2026
- 2026Skill Self-Play: Pushing the Frontier of LLM Capability with Co-Evolving Skills24 Jul 2026
- 2026RELIC: Revealed Principles for Learning Interpretable Composable Skills in Multi-Agent Planning18 Jul 2026
- 2026Dynamic Agent Skills: A Lifecycle Survey and Taxonomy of Evolving Skill Libraries11 Jul 2026
- 2026Inside the Skill Market: From Software Engineering Activities to Reusable Agent Skills10 Jul 2026
- 2026MetaSkill-Evolve: Recursive Self-Improvement of LLM Agents via Two-Timescale Meta-Skill Evolution6 Jul 2026
- 2026Generative Skill Composition for LLM Agents30 Jun 2026
- 2026Hierarchical Experimentalist Agents28 Jun 2026
- 2026EvoClawBench: Can Agents Learn Reusable Skills from Their Own Runs?23 Jun 2026
- 2026Managing Procedural Memory in LLM Agents: Control, Adaptation, and Evaluation22 Jun 2026
- 2026SkillWiki: A Living Knowledge Infrastructure for Agent Skills15 Jun 2026
- 2026SkillChain: Closing the Loop on Skill Evolution for Image-Based E-Commerce AI Assistants11 Jun 2026
- 2026RedAct: Redacting Agent Capability Traces for Procedural Skill Protection9 Jun 2026
- 2026Co-Evolving Skill Generation and Policy Optimization7 Jun 2026
- 2026Beyond Rubrics: Exploration-Guided Evaluation Skills for Reward Modeling5 Jun 2026
- 2026Workflow-to-Skill: Skill Creation via Routing-Workflow-Semantics-Attachments Decomposition5 Jun 2026
- 2026Unsupervised Skill Discovery for Agentic Data Analysis4 Jun 2026
- 2026SkillComposer: Learning to Evolve Agent Skills for Specification and Generalization4 Jun 2026
- 2026Online Skill Learning for Web Agents via State-Grounded Dynamic Retrieval3 Jun 2026
- 2026SkillSmith: Co-Evolving Skills and Tools for Self-Improving Agent Systems31 May 2026
- 2026SkillRevise: Improving LLM-Authored Agent Skills via Trace-Conditioned Skill Revision31 May 2026
- 2026Skill or Skip? Learning Selective Skill Invocation in Agentic Tasks via Dual-Granularity Preference Learning30 May 2026
- 2026GRASP: Gated Regression-Aware Skill Proposer for Self-Improving LLM Agents28 May 2026
50 newest of 69 All 69 (JSON)
- 2026SkillOpt: Executive Strategy for Self-Evolving Agent Skillscited by 122
- 2026SkillGen: Verified Inference-Time Agent Skill Synthesiscited by 29
- 2026SkillRevise: Improving LLM-Authored Agent Skills via Trace-Conditioned Skill Revisioncited by 21
- 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
- 2026From Skill Text to Skill Structure: The Scheduling-Structural-Logical Representation for Agent Skillscited by 15
- 2026SkillSafetyBench: Evaluating Agent Safety under Skill-Facing Attack Surfacescited by 15
- 2026MetaSkill-Evolve: Recursive Self-Improvement of LLM Agents via Two-Timescale Meta-Skill Evolutioncited by 12
- 2026GRASP: Gated Regression-Aware Skill Proposer for Self-Improving LLM Agentscited by 10
- 2026Managing Procedural Memory in LLM Agents: Control, Adaptation, and Evaluationcited by 8
- 2026SkillFlow: Flow-Driven Recursive Skill Evolution for Agentic Orchestrationcited by 6
- 2026Dynamic Agent Skills: A Lifecycle Survey and Taxonomy of Evolving Skill Librariescited by 6
12 most cited of 42 All 42 (JSON)
- 2026SkillSpec: Consensus-Gated Agent Skill Evolution via Representation Specialization30 Sep 2026
- 2026GenMem: Generative Symbolic Memory for Self-Evolving Harness28 Sep 2026
- 2026GraphSkillEvo: Evolutionary Optimization of Graph-Structured Agent Skills18 Sep 2026
- 2026Subagents vs Agent Skills: Executing Reusable Knowledge for Long-Horizon Agentic Tasks7 Sep 2026
- 2026AgentLeak: Cloning Stronger LLM Agent Capabilities onto Weaker Agents Beyond Skill Stealing7 Sep 2026
- 2026Towards a Systems Foundation for Agentic Skills: Architecture, Lifecycle, and Security30 Aug 2026
- 2026STAGE: Stateful Translation to Agentic Graph Execution with Policy-Scoped Context and Deterministic Control23 Aug 2026
- 2026Graph Engineering in the Era of LLM Agents: From Individual Intelligence to System Intelligence21 Aug 2026
- 2026Demystifying Agent Skills: Why They Work-Until They Don't14 Aug 2026
- 2026Better, Faster, Stronger: Programmatic Skill Learning Best Reduces Agent Cost11 Aug 2026
- 2026MERA: Model Evolution and Routing with Skill Adaptation for Agentic Systems at Scale11 Aug 2026
- 2026ColluSkill: Adversarial Cross-Skill Composition for Evading Agent Skill Scanners10 Aug 2026
12 newest of 42 All 42 (JSON)
- 2026From Context to Skills: Can Language Models Learn from Context Skillfully?cited by 19
- 2026MMSkills: Towards Multimodal Skills for General Visual Agentscited by 13
- 2026Co-Evolving Skill Generation and Policy Optimizationcited by 5
- 2026Agent Skills Matter: Inferring Proprietary Skills from Execution Trajectoriescited by 4
- 2026SkillEvolBench: Benchmarking the Evolution from Episodic Experience to Procedural Skillscited by 3
- 2026Ace-Skill: Bootstrapping Multimodal Agents with Prioritized and Clustered Evolutioncited by 2
- 2026SkillWiki: A Living Knowledge Infrastructure for Agent Skillscited by 2
- 2026Evidence Over Plans: Online Trajectory Verification for Skill Distillationcited by 1
- 2026Maestro: Reinforcement Learning to Orchestrate Hierarchical Model-Skill Ensemblescited by 1
- 2026Inside the Skill Market: From Software Engineering Activities to Reusable Agent Skillscited by 1
- 2026SkillChain: Closing the Loop on Skill Evolution for Image-Based E-Commerce AI Assistantscited by 0
- 2026ToolLIFT: Lifting Tool-Specific Trajectories into Function-Level Graphs for Generalizable Tool Planningcited by 0
12 most cited of 19 All 19 (JSON)
- 2026Universal Textual Teaching for LLMs8 Oct 2026
- 2026From Learner Behavior to Reusable Skills for Effective and Efficient Learner Simulation29 Sep 2026
- 2026EASE: Behavior-Adaptive Skill Curation for Self-Evolving Agents29 Sep 2026
- 2026TTSE: A Two-Track Online Self-Evolution Framework21 Sep 2026
- 2026DMRL: Document-Mediated Reinforcement Learning for Skill Optimization in Advertising Recommendation2 Sep 2026
- 2026Competence, Not Accuracy: A Diagnostic for Reference-Free Judge Gates in Skill Optimization19 Aug 2026
- 2026SkillEvo: Self-Renewing Evolution Gradients from Multi-Turn Interaction Feedback13 Aug 2026
- 2026ToolLIFT: Lifting Tool-Specific Trajectories into Function-Level Graphs for Generalizable Tool Planning4 Aug 2026
- 2026Agent Skills Matter: Inferring Proprietary Skills from Execution Trajectories28 Jul 2026
- 2026Inside the Skill Market: From Software Engineering Activities to Reusable Agent Skills10 Jul 2026
- 2026SkillWiki: A Living Knowledge Infrastructure for Agent Skills15 Jun 2026
- 2026SkillChain: Closing the Loop on Skill Evolution for Image-Based E-Commerce AI Assistants11 Jun 2026
12 newest of 19 All 19 (JSON)
Similar, not cited
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- 2026SkillCommit: Evolving Agent Skills through Behaviorally Validated Scope Expansion
- 2025Automated Skill Discovery for Language Agents through Exploration and Iterative Feedback
- 2026Agent Skills for Large Language Models: Architecture, Acquisition, Security, and the Path Forward
- 2026Skills-Coach: A Self-Evolving Skill Optimizer via Training-Free GRPO
- 2026MUSE-Autoskill: Self-Evolving Agents via Skill Creation, Memory, Management, and Evaluation
- 2026SkillCorpus: Consolidating and Evaluating the Open Skill Ecosystem for Real-World LLM Agents
- 2026SkillLens: Adaptive Multi-Granularity Skill Reuse for Cost-Efficient LLM Agents
- 2026SkillFocus: Evolving Agent Skills via Capability Decomposition