SkillClaw: Let Skills Evolve Collectively with Agentic Evolver
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
- 2026MetaClaw: Just Talk -- An Agent That Meta-Learns and Evolves in the Wild17 Mar
- 2026EvoSkill: Automated Skill Discovery for Multi-Agent Systems3 Mar
- 2026SoK: Agentic Skills -- Beyond Tool Use in LLM Agents24 Feb
- 2026SkillsBench: Benchmarking How Well Agent Skills Work Across Diverse Tasks13 Feb
- 2026SkillRL: Evolving Agents via Recursive Skill-Augmented Reinforcement Learning9 Feb
- 2025Audited Skill-Graph Self-Improvement for Agentic LLMs via Verifiable Rewards, Experience Synthesis, and Continual Memory28 Dec
Other references · 26
- 2022ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Modelscited by 8,355
- 2023Reflexion: Language Agents with Verbal Reinforcement Learningcited by 4,064
- 2023Voyager: An Open-Ended Embodied Agent with Large Language Modelscited by 2,081
- 2023ExpeL: LLM Agents Are Experiential Learnerscited by 814
- 2025Mem0: Building Production-Ready AI Agents with Scalable Long-Term Memorycited by 722
- 2025ReasoningBank: Scaling Agent Self-Evolving with Reasoning Memorycited by 253
- 2025SkillWeaver: Web Agents can Self-Improve by Discovering and Honing Skillscited by 174
- 2026SimpleMem: Efficient Lifelong Memory for LLM Agentscited by 140
- 2025EvolveR: Self-Evolving LLM Agents through an Experience-Driven Lifecyclecited by 129
- 2026MemSkill: Learning and Evolving Memory Skills for Self-Evolving Agentscited by 129
- 2026MemRL: Self-Evolving Agents via Runtime Reinforcement Learning on Episodic Memorycited by 113
- 2025AgenTracer: Who Is Inducing Failure in the LLM Agentic Systems?cited by 105
14 more
- 2026AutoSkill: Experience-Driven Lifelong Learning via Skill Self-Evolutioncited by 105
- 2025Agent KB: Leveraging Cross-Domain Experience for Agentic Problem Solvingcited by 90
- 2025Memp: Exploring Agent Procedural Memorycited by 88
- 2026OpenClaw-RL: Train Any Agent Simply by Talkingcited by 83
- 2025MemEvolve: Meta-Evolution of Agent Memory Systemscited by 81
- 2025AgentEvolver: Towards Efficient Self-Evolving Agent Systemcited by 77
- 2025WebEvolver: Enhancing Web Agent Self-Improvement with Coevolving World Modelcited by 56
- 2026SkillNet: Create, Evaluate, and Connect AI Skillscited by 48
- 2025Contextual Experience Replay for Self-Improvement of Language Agentscited by 46
- 2023Testing Language Model Agents Safely in the Wildcited by 45
- 2024Skill Set Optimization: Reinforcing Language Model Behavior via Transferable Skillscited by 24
- 2026SkillOrchestra: Learning to Route Agents via Skill Transfercited by 22
- 2026RetroAgent: From Solving to Evolving via Retrospective Dual Intrinsic Feedbackcited by 16
- 2025WebCoach: Self-Evolving Web Agents with Cross-Session Memory Guidancecited by 15
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Citing papers per year: 2026: 76.
76 papers.
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- 2026SkillOpt: Executive Strategy for Self-Evolving Agent Skillscited by 122
- 2026Agentic Harness Engineering: Observability-Driven Automatic Evolution of Coding-Agent Harnessescited by 119
- 2026SkillGrad: Optimizing Agent Skills Like Gradient Descentcited by 23
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- 2026SkillsVote: Lifecycle Governance of Agent Skills from Collection, Recommendation to Evolutioncited by 18
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- 2026GUI Agents for Continual Game Generationcited by 16
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- 2026SkillFlow: Flow-Driven Recursive Skill Evolution for Agentic Orchestrationcited by 6
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- 2026DemoEvolve: Overcoming Sparse Feedback in Agentic Harness Evolution with Demonstrationscited by 5
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- 2026Co-Evolving Skill Generation and Policy Optimizationcited by 5
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- 2026From Anatomy to Smells: An Empirical Study of SKILL.md in Agent Skillscited by 5
- 2026SkillSmith: Co-Evolving Skills and Tools for Self-Improving Agent Systemscited by 4
- 2026Role-Agent: Bootstrapping LLM Agents via Dual-Role Evolutioncited by 4
- 2026Learning Agentic Policy from Action Guidancecited by 3
- 2026SkillEvolBench: Benchmarking the Evolution from Episodic Experience to Procedural Skillscited by 3
- 2026Skill is Not One-Size-Fits-All: Model-Aware Skill Alignment for LLM Agentscited by 3
- 2026APPO: Agentic Procedural Policy Optimizationcited by 3
- 2026Not All Skills Help: Measuring and Repairing Agent Knowledgecited by 3
- 2026SkillZip: Evaluation-Free Skill Compression for Self-Evolving Agents by Discovering Reusable Structurecited by 3
- 2026SkillForge: Evolving Verifiable Skills for Reinforcement Learning Agentscited by 3
- 2026Ace-Skill: Bootstrapping Multimodal Agents with Prioritized and Clustered Evolutioncited by 2
- 2026Agent-ValueBench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Evaluating Agent Valuescited by 2
- 2026Test-Time Learning with an Evolving Librarycited by 2
- 2026MMG2Skill: Can Agents Distill In-the-Wild Guides into Self-Evolving Skills?cited by 2
- 2026SkillComposer: Learning to Evolve Agent Skills for Specification and Generalizationcited by 2
- 2026Unsupervised Skill Discovery for Agentic Data Analysiscited by 2
- 2026Hierarchical Experimentalist Agentscited by 2
- 2026UniClawBench: A Universal Benchmark for Proactive Agents on Real-World Taskscited by 2
- 2026SKILLER: Language-Level Reinforcement Learning for Reusable Skill Extraction in Small Language Modelscited by 2
- 2026Practice Makes Unsafe: Skill Misevolution in Self-Improving LLM Agentscited by 2
- 2026Agentic-imodels: Evolving agentic interpretability tools via autoresearchcited by 1
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50 most cited of 76 All 76 (JSON)
- 2026SkillFM: Generating Skills for LLM Agents via Latent Flow Matching30 Sep 2026
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- 2026PluginRSI: Recursive Improvement of Agent Harnesses with Reusable Plugins26 Sep 2026
- 2026Enabling Timely Guidance before Skill Retrieval: Retaining Helpful Warm Tips in Agent Context26 Sep 2026
- 2026MammoClaw: Towards Skill-Evolving Agent Harness for Breast Cancer Mammography Analysis25 Sep 2026
- 2026A Wrong Turn Does Not Ruin the Journey: Deviation-Guided Skill Self-Evolution for LLM Agents24 Sep 2026
- 2026GraphSkillEvo: Evolutionary Optimization of Graph-Structured Agent Skills18 Sep 2026
- 2026SkillLift: Learning Dense Rubrics from Sparse Oracles for Efficient Skill Evolution14 Sep 2026
- 2026APEx: Distillation of Agent Procedural Experience for Adaptive Deep Research Question Answering2 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
- 2026SkillForge: Evolving Verifiable Skills for Reinforcement Learning Agents25 Aug 2026
38 more
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- 2026VCE-Skill: Enhancing Skill Self-Evolution with Version-Change Experience17 Aug 2026
- 2026Practice Makes Unsafe: Skill Misevolution in Self-Improving LLM Agents13 Aug 2026
- 2026Better, Faster, Stronger: Programmatic Skill Learning Best Reduces Agent Cost11 Aug 2026
- 2026SkillZip: Evaluation-Free Skill Compression for Self-Evolving Agents by Discovering Reusable Structure11 Aug 2026
- 2026SKILLER: Language-Level Reinforcement Learning for Reusable Skill Extraction in Small Language Models11 Aug 2026
- 2026Bidirectional Context Self-Distillation for Reinforcement Learning of Skill-Based LLM Agents10 Aug 2026
- 2026Query-Only Backdoor Attacks on Self-Evolving Skills via Trajectory Poisoning8 Aug 2026
- 2026DiDPO: Diff-in-Diff Policy Optimization for Coding Agent Training7 Aug 2026
- 2026When Experience Becomes Instruction: Trajectory Poisoning in Self-Evolving Agent Skill Systems6 Aug 2026
- 2026LongHorizon-Harness: Advancing Long-Horizon Agents for Real-World Tasks3 Aug 2026
- 2026PATH-Bench: Path-Dependent Evaluation of Lifelong Agents2 Aug 2026
- 2026Rethinking Self-Evolution: A Constrained Exploration-Exploitation Process for Mitigating Skill Overfitting29 Jul 2026
- 2026GuideSkill: Evolving Executable LLM Agent Skills for Guideline-Grounded Clinical Reasoning28 Jul 2026
- 2026Dynamic Agent Skills: A Lifecycle Survey and Taxonomy of Evolving Skill Libraries11 Jul 2026
- 2026UniClawBench: A Universal Benchmark for Proactive Agents on Real-World Tasks9 Jul 2026
- 2026MetaSkill-Evolve: Recursive Self-Improvement of LLM Agents via Two-Timescale Meta-Skill Evolution6 Jul 2026
- 2026From Anatomy to Smells: An Empirical Study of SKILL.md in Agent Skills1 Jul 2026
- 2026Towards High-Resolution Visual Perception via Hierarchical Entity Exploration1 Jul 2026
- 2026Hierarchical Experimentalist Agents28 Jun 2026
- 2026Managing Procedural Memory in LLM Agents: Control, Adaptation, and Evaluation22 Jun 2026
- 2026EvoRec: Self Evolving Agentic Recommender Systems15 Jun 2026
- 2026Not All Skills Help: Measuring and Repairing Agent Knowledge13 Jun 2026
- 2026SkillCAT: Contrastive, Assessment-Augmented and Topology-AwareSkill Self-Evolution for LLM Agents11 Jun 2026
- 2026ReSum: Synergizing LLM Reasoning and Summarization with Reinforcement Learning11 Jun 2026
- 2026SkillChain: Closing the Loop on Skill Evolution for Image-Based E-Commerce AI Assistants11 Jun 2026
- 2026APPO: Agentic Procedural Policy Optimization10 Jun 2026
- 2026Agent Skill Evaluation and Evolution: Frameworks and Benchmarks9 Jun 2026
- 2026Role-Agent: Bootstrapping LLM Agents via Dual-Role Evolution9 Jun 2026
- 2026Co-Evolving Skill Generation and Policy Optimization7 Jun 2026
- 2026Unsupervised Skill Discovery for Agentic Data Analysis4 Jun 2026
- 2026SkillComposer: Learning to Evolve Agent Skills for Specification and Generalization4 Jun 2026
- 2026FederatedSkill: Federated Learning for Agentic Skill Evolution2 Jun 2026
- 2026MMG2Skill: Can Agents Distill In-the-Wild Guides into Self-Evolving Skills?1 Jun 2026
- 2026SkillSmith: Co-Evolving Skills and Tools for Self-Improving Agent Systems31 May 2026
- 2026SkillAdaptor: Self-Adapting Skills for LLM Agents from Trajectories31 May 2026
- 2026SkillRevise: Improving LLM-Authored Agent Skills via Trace-Conditioned Skill Revision31 May 2026
- 2026Skill is Not One-Size-Fits-All: Model-Aware Skill Alignment for LLM Agents29 May 2026
50 newest of 76 All 76 (JSON)
- 2026SkillOpt: Executive Strategy for Self-Evolving Agent Skillscited by 122
- 2026Agentic Harness Engineering: Observability-Driven Automatic Evolution of Coding-Agent Harnessescited by 119
- 2026SkillGrad: Optimizing Agent Skills Like Gradient Descentcited by 23
- 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
- 2026SkillGenBench: Benchmarking Skill Generation Pipelines for LLM Agentscited by 17
- 2026GUI Agents for Continual Game Generationcited by 16
- 2026MetaSkill-Evolve: Recursive Self-Improvement of LLM Agents via Two-Timescale Meta-Skill Evolutioncited by 12
- 2026ClawGym: A Scalable Framework for Building Effective Claw Agentscited by 11
- 2026SkillAdaptor: Self-Adapting Skills for LLM Agents from Trajectoriescited by 10
- 2026MOSS: Self-Evolution through Source-Level Rewriting in Autonomous Agent Systemscited by 9
12 most cited of 56 All 56 (JSON)
- 2026SkillFM: Generating Skills for LLM Agents via Latent Flow Matching30 Sep 2026
- 2026Learning from Others, Acting for You: Cross-User Memory Sharing for LLM Agents26 Sep 2026
- 2026PluginRSI: Recursive Improvement of Agent Harnesses with Reusable Plugins26 Sep 2026
- 2026Enabling Timely Guidance before Skill Retrieval: Retaining Helpful Warm Tips in Agent Context26 Sep 2026
- 2026MammoClaw: Towards Skill-Evolving Agent Harness for Breast Cancer Mammography Analysis25 Sep 2026
- 2026A Wrong Turn Does Not Ruin the Journey: Deviation-Guided Skill Self-Evolution for LLM Agents24 Sep 2026
- 2026GraphSkillEvo: Evolutionary Optimization of Graph-Structured Agent Skills18 Sep 2026
- 2026SkillLift: Learning Dense Rubrics from Sparse Oracles for Efficient Skill Evolution14 Sep 2026
- 2026APEx: Distillation of Agent Procedural Experience for Adaptive Deep Research Question Answering2 Sep 2026
- 2026Towards a Systems Foundation for Agentic Skills: Architecture, Lifecycle, and Security30 Aug 2026
- 2026SkillForge: Evolving Verifiable Skills for Reinforcement Learning Agents25 Aug 2026
- 2026Practice Makes Unsafe: Skill Misevolution in Self-Improving LLM Agents13 Aug 2026
12 newest of 56 All 56 (JSON)
- 2026RISE: Reliable Improvement in Self-Evolving Vision-Language Modelscited by 1
- 2026GuideSkill: Evolving Executable LLM Agent Skills for Guideline-Grounded Clinical Reasoningcited by 1
- 2026Rethinking Self-Evolution: A Constrained Exploration-Exploitation Process for Mitigating Skill Overfittingcited by 1
- 2026ReSum: Synergizing LLM Reasoning and Summarization with Reinforcement Learningcited by 0
- 2026Rethinking Self-Evolution: A Constrained Exploration-Exploitation Process for Mitigating Skill Overfitting29 Jul 2026
- 2026GuideSkill: Evolving Executable LLM Agent Skills for Guideline-Grounded Clinical Reasoning28 Jul 2026
- 2026ReSum: Synergizing LLM Reasoning and Summarization with Reinforcement Learning11 Jun 2026
- 2026RISE: Reliable Improvement in Self-Evolving Vision-Language Models20 May 2026
- 2026From Context to Skills: Can Language Models Learn from Context Skillfully?cited by 19
- 2026Co-Evolving Skill Generation and Policy Optimizationcited by 5
- 2026SkillEvolBench: Benchmarking the Evolution from Episodic Experience to Procedural Skillscited by 3
- 2026SkillZip: Evaluation-Free Skill Compression for Self-Evolving Agents by Discovering Reusable Structurecited by 3
- 2026Ace-Skill: Bootstrapping Multimodal Agents with Prioritized and Clustered Evolutioncited by 2
- 2026Test-Time Learning with an Evolving Librarycited by 2
- 2026SKILLER: Language-Level Reinforcement Learning for Reusable Skill Extraction in Small Language Modelscited by 2
- 2026Residual Skill Optimization for Text-to-SQL Ensemblescited by 0
- 2026Verilog-Evolve: Feedback-Driven and Skill-Evolving Verilog Generationcited by 0
- 2026SkillChain: Closing the Loop on Skill Evolution for Image-Based E-Commerce AI Assistantscited by 0
- 2026VCE-Skill: Enhancing Skill Self-Evolution with Version-Change Experiencecited by 0
- 2026Competence, Not Accuracy: A Diagnostic for Reference-Free Judge Gates in Skill Optimizationcited by 0
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- 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
- 2026VCE-Skill: Enhancing Skill Self-Evolution with Version-Change Experience17 Aug 2026
- 2026SkillZip: Evaluation-Free Skill Compression for Self-Evolving Agents by Discovering Reusable Structure11 Aug 2026
- 2026SKILLER: Language-Level Reinforcement Learning for Reusable Skill Extraction in Small Language Models11 Aug 2026
- 2026SkillChain: Closing the Loop on Skill Evolution for Image-Based E-Commerce AI Assistants11 Jun 2026
- 2026Co-Evolving Skill Generation and Policy Optimization7 Jun 2026
- 2026Verilog-Evolve: Feedback-Driven and Skill-Evolving Verilog Generation26 May 2026
- 2026SkillEvolBench: Benchmarking the Evolution from Episodic Experience to Procedural Skills22 May 2026
- 2026Residual Skill Optimization for Text-to-SQL Ensembles20 May 2026
- 2026Test-Time Learning with an Evolving Library14 May 2026
- 2026Ace-Skill: Bootstrapping Multimodal Agents with Prioritized and Clustered Evolution9 May 2026
12 newest of 13 All 13 (JSON)
Similar, not cited
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- 2026MUSE-Autoskill: Self-Evolving Agents via Skill Creation, Memory, Management, and Evaluation
- 2026ContinualSkillBench: Can LLM Agents Truly Evolve Their Capabilities?
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