mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

SkillClaw: Let Skills Evolve Collectively with Agentic Evolver

arXiv 2604.08377 ↗First posted 9 Apr 2026cs.AI cs.CLcited by 76

On the map: LLM agents and tool use → Agent skill learning and evolution

Abstract (arXiv)

Large language model (LLM) agents such as OpenClaw rely on reusable skills to perform complex tasks, yet these skills remain largely static after deployment. As a result, similar workflows, tool usage patterns, and failure modes are repeatedly rediscovered across users, preventing the system from improving with experience. While interactions from different users provide complementary signals about when a skill works or fails, existing systems lack a mechanism to convert such heterogeneous experiences into reliable skill updates. To address these issues, we present SkillClaw, a framework for collective skill evolution in multi-user agent ecosystems, which treats cross-user and over-time interactions as the primary signal for improving skills. SkillClaw continuously aggregates trajectories generated during use and processes them with an autonomous evolver, which identifies recurring behavioral patterns and translates them into updates to the skill set by refining existing skills or extending them with new capabilities. The resulting skills are maintained in a shared repository and synchronized across users, allowing improvements discovered in one context to propagate system-wide while requiring no additional effort from users. By integrating multi-user experience into ongoing skill updates, SkillClaw enables cross-user knowledge transfer and cumulative capability improvement, and experiments on WildClawBench show that limited interaction and feedback, it significantly improves the performance of Qwen3-Max in real-world agent scenarios.

Key facts. Cited by 76 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 32 of its 35 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 9 Apr 2026.

Builds on

32 of 35 references.

Closest ancestors · 6

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2026MetaClaw: Just Talk -- An Agent That Meta-Learns and Evolves in the Wild17 Mar
  2. 2026EvoSkill: Automated Skill Discovery for Multi-Agent Systems3 Mar
  3. 2026SoK: Agentic Skills -- Beyond Tool Use in LLM Agents24 Feb
  4. 2026SkillsBench: Benchmarking How Well Agent Skills Work Across Diverse Tasks13 Feb
  5. 2026SkillRL: Evolving Agents via Recursive Skill-Augmented Reinforcement Learning9 Feb
  6. 2025Audited Skill-Graph Self-Improvement for Agentic LLMs via Verifiable Rewards, Experience Synthesis, and Continual Memory28 Dec

Other references · 26

  1. 2022ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Modelscited by 8,355
  2. 2023Reflexion: Language Agents with Verbal Reinforcement Learningcited by 4,064
  3. 2023Voyager: An Open-Ended Embodied Agent with Large Language Modelscited by 2,081
  4. 2023ExpeL: LLM Agents Are Experiential Learnerscited by 814
  5. 2025Mem0: Building Production-Ready AI Agents with Scalable Long-Term Memorycited by 722
  6. 2025ReasoningBank: Scaling Agent Self-Evolving with Reasoning Memorycited by 253
  7. 2025SkillWeaver: Web Agents can Self-Improve by Discovering and Honing Skillscited by 174
  8. 2026SimpleMem: Efficient Lifelong Memory for LLM Agentscited by 140
  9. 2025EvolveR: Self-Evolving LLM Agents through an Experience-Driven Lifecyclecited by 129
  10. 2026MemSkill: Learning and Evolving Memory Skills for Self-Evolving Agentscited by 129
  11. 2026MemRL: Self-Evolving Agents via Runtime Reinforcement Learning on Episodic Memorycited by 113
  12. 2025AgenTracer: Who Is Inducing Failure in the LLM Agentic Systems?cited by 105
14 more
  1. 2026AutoSkill: Experience-Driven Lifelong Learning via Skill Self-Evolutioncited by 105
  2. 2025Agent KB: Leveraging Cross-Domain Experience for Agentic Problem Solvingcited by 90
  3. 2025Memp: Exploring Agent Procedural Memorycited by 88
  4. 2026OpenClaw-RL: Train Any Agent Simply by Talkingcited by 83
  5. 2025MemEvolve: Meta-Evolution of Agent Memory Systemscited by 81
  6. 2025AgentEvolver: Towards Efficient Self-Evolving Agent Systemcited by 77
  7. 2025WebEvolver: Enhancing Web Agent Self-Improvement with Coevolving World Modelcited by 56
  8. 2026SkillNet: Create, Evaluate, and Connect AI Skillscited by 48
  9. 2025Contextual Experience Replay for Self-Improvement of Language Agentscited by 46
  10. 2023Testing Language Model Agents Safely in the Wildcited by 45
  11. 2024Skill Set Optimization: Reinforcing Language Model Behavior via Transferable Skillscited by 24
  12. 2026SkillOrchestra: Learning to Route Agents via Skill Transfercited by 22
  13. 2026RetroAgent: From Solving to Evolving via Retrospective Dual Intrinsic Feedbackcited by 16
  14. 2025WebCoach: Self-Evolving Web Agents with Cross-Session Memory Guidancecited by 15

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 76.

76 papers.

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By area:

  1. 2026SkillOpt: Executive Strategy for Self-Evolving Agent Skillscited by 122
  2. 2026Agentic Harness Engineering: Observability-Driven Automatic Evolution of Coding-Agent Harnessescited by 119
  3. 2026SkillGrad: Optimizing Agent Skills Like Gradient Descentcited by 23
  4. 2026SkillRevise: Improving LLM-Authored Agent Skills via Trace-Conditioned Skill Revisioncited by 21
  5. 2026From Context to Skills: Can Language Models Learn from Context Skillfully?cited by 19
  6. 2026SkillsVote: Lifecycle Governance of Agent Skills from Collection, Recommendation to Evolutioncited by 18
  7. 2026A Comprehensive Survey on Agent Skills: Taxonomy, Techniques, and Applicationscited by 17
  8. 2026SkillGenBench: Benchmarking Skill Generation Pipelines for LLM Agentscited by 17
  9. 2026GUI Agents for Continual Game Generationcited by 16
  10. 2026MetaSkill-Evolve: Recursive Self-Improvement of LLM Agents via Two-Timescale Meta-Skill Evolutioncited by 12
  11. 2026ClawGym: A Scalable Framework for Building Effective Claw Agentscited by 11
  12. 2026SkillAdaptor: Self-Adapting Skills for LLM Agents from Trajectoriescited by 10
38 more
  1. 2026MOSS: Self-Evolution through Source-Level Rewriting in Autonomous Agent Systemscited by 9
  2. 2026LongHorizon-Harness: Advancing Long-Horizon Agents for Real-World Taskscited by 9
  3. 2026Managing Procedural Memory in LLM Agents: Control, Adaptation, and Evaluationcited by 8
  4. 2026SkillFlow: Flow-Driven Recursive Skill Evolution for Agentic Orchestrationcited by 6
  5. 2026CODESKILL: Learning Self-Evolving Skills for Coding Agentscited by 6
  6. 2026FederatedSkill: Federated Learning for Agentic Skill Evolutioncited by 6
  7. 2026Agent Skill Evaluation and Evolution: Frameworks and Benchmarkscited by 6
  8. 2026Dynamic Agent Skills: A Lifecycle Survey and Taxonomy of Evolving Skill Librariescited by 6
  9. 2026Harnessing AtomisticSkills for Agentic Atomistic Researchcited by 5
  10. 2026DemoEvolve: Overcoming Sparse Feedback in Agentic Harness Evolution with Demonstrationscited by 5
  11. 2026Skill0.5: Joint Skill Internalization and Utilization for Out-of-Distribution Generalization in Agentic Reinforcement Learningcited by 5
  12. 2026Co-Evolving Skill Generation and Policy Optimizationcited by 5
  13. 2026SkillCAT: Contrastive, Assessment-Augmented and Topology-AwareSkill Self-Evolution for LLM Agentscited by 5
  14. 2026From Anatomy to Smells: An Empirical Study of SKILL.md in Agent Skillscited by 5
  15. 2026SkillSmith: Co-Evolving Skills and Tools for Self-Improving Agent Systemscited by 4
  16. 2026Role-Agent: Bootstrapping LLM Agents via Dual-Role Evolutioncited by 4
  17. 2026Learning Agentic Policy from Action Guidancecited by 3
  18. 2026SkillEvolBench: Benchmarking the Evolution from Episodic Experience to Procedural Skillscited by 3
  19. 2026Skill is Not One-Size-Fits-All: Model-Aware Skill Alignment for LLM Agentscited by 3
  20. 2026APPO: Agentic Procedural Policy Optimizationcited by 3
  21. 2026Not All Skills Help: Measuring and Repairing Agent Knowledgecited by 3
  22. 2026SkillZip: Evaluation-Free Skill Compression for Self-Evolving Agents by Discovering Reusable Structurecited by 3
  23. 2026SkillForge: Evolving Verifiable Skills for Reinforcement Learning Agentscited by 3
  24. 2026Ace-Skill: Bootstrapping Multimodal Agents with Prioritized and Clustered Evolutioncited by 2
  25. 2026Agent-ValueBench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Evaluating Agent Valuescited by 2
  26. 2026Test-Time Learning with an Evolving Librarycited by 2
  27. 2026MMG2Skill: Can Agents Distill In-the-Wild Guides into Self-Evolving Skills?cited by 2
  28. 2026SkillComposer: Learning to Evolve Agent Skills for Specification and Generalizationcited by 2
  29. 2026Unsupervised Skill Discovery for Agentic Data Analysiscited by 2
  30. 2026Hierarchical Experimentalist Agentscited by 2
  31. 2026UniClawBench: A Universal Benchmark for Proactive Agents on Real-World Taskscited by 2
  32. 2026SKILLER: Language-Level Reinforcement Learning for Reusable Skill Extraction in Small Language Modelscited by 2
  33. 2026Practice Makes Unsafe: Skill Misevolution in Self-Improving LLM Agentscited by 2
  34. 2026Agentic-imodels: Evolving agentic interpretability tools via autoresearchcited by 1
  35. 2026RISE: Reliable Improvement in Self-Evolving Vision-Language Modelscited by 1
  36. 2026MaskClaw: Edge-Side Personalized Privacy Arbitration for GUI Agents with Behavior-Driven Skill Evolutioncited by 1
  37. 2026EvoRec: Self Evolving Agentic Recommender Systemscited by 1
  38. 2026FlowEvo: Self-Evolving Agents through the Co-Evolution of Workflows and Executable Skillscited by 1

50 most cited of 76 All 76 (JSON)

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2026OpenClaw-Skill: Collective Skill Tree Search for Agentic Large Language Models
  2. 2026MUSE-Autoskill: Self-Evolving Agents via Skill Creation, Memory, Management, and Evaluation
  3. 2026ContinualSkillBench: Can LLM Agents Truly Evolve Their Capabilities?
  4. 2026SkillCommit: Evolving Agent Skills through Behaviorally Validated Scope Expansion
  5. 2026SkillFocus: Evolving Agent Skills via Capability Decomposition
  6. 2026SkillVine: Agent Skill Evolution via Branching Exploration
  7. 2026SkillForge: Co-Evolving Skills and Agents via Dynamic Skill Lifecycles
  8. 2026SkillMAS: Skill Co-Evolution with LLM-based Multi-Agent System