mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

Co-Evolving LLM Decision and Skill Bank Agents for Long-Horizon Tasks

arXiv 2604.20987 ↗First posted 22 Apr 2026cs.AIcited by 13

On the map: LLM agents and tool use → Reinforcement learning for LLM agents

Abstract (arXiv)

Long horizon interactive environments are a testbed for evaluating agents skill usage abilities. These environments demand multi step reasoning, the chaining of multiple skills over many timesteps, and robust decision making under delayed rewards and partial observability. Games are a good testbed for evaluating agent skill usage in environments. Large Language Models (LLMs) offer a promising alternative as game playing agents, but they often struggle with consistent long horizon decision making because they lack a mechanism to discover, retain, and reuse structured skills across episodes. We present COSPLAY, a co evolution framework in which an LLM decision agent retrieves skills from a learnable skill bank to guide action taking, while an agent managed skill pipeline discovers reusable skills from the agents unlabeled rollouts to form a skill bank. Our framework improves both the decision agent to learn better skill retrieval and action generation, while the skill bank agent continually extracts, refines, and updates skills together with their contracts. Experiments across six game environments show that COSPLAY with an 8B base model achieves over 25.1 percent average reward improvement against four frontier LLM baselines on single player game benchmarks while remaining competitive on multi player social reasoning games.

Key facts. Cited by 13 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Reinforcement learning for LLM agents, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use. Builds on 46 of its 55 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 22 Apr 2026.

Builds on

46 of 55 references.

Closest ancestors · 8

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2025Agentic Reinforcement Learning with Implicit Step Rewards23 Sep
  2. 2025Orak: A Foundational Benchmark for Training and Evaluating LLM Agents on Diverse Video Games4 Jun
  3. 2025Group-in-Group Policy Optimization for LLM Agent Training16 May
  4. 2025Agents Play Thousands of 3D Video Games17 Mar
  5. 2024BALROG: Benchmarking Agentic LLM and VLM Reasoning On Games20 Nov
  6. 2024Optimus-1: Hybrid Multimodal Memory Empowered Agents Excel in Long-Horizon Tasks7 Aug
  7. 2024A Survey on Large Language Model-Based Game Agents2 Apr
  8. 2023Voyager: An Open-Ended Embodied Agent with Large Language Models25 May

Other references · 38

  1. 2024DeepSeekMath: Pushing the Limits of Mathematical Reasoning in Open Language Modelscited by 8,851
  2. 2025Qwen3 Technical Reportcited by 8,195
  3. 2021Measuring Mathematical Problem Solving With the MATH Datasetcited by 5,203
  4. 2023Let's Verify Step by Stepcited by 3,598
  5. 2013Playing Atari with Deep Reinforcement Learningcited by 3,211
  6. 2024MMLU-Pro: A More Robust and Challenging Multi-Task Language Understanding Benchmarkcited by 1,758
  7. 2019Dota 2 with Large Scale Deep Reinforcement Learningcited by 1,084
  8. 2017Mastering Chess and Shogi by Self-Play with a General Reinforcement Learning Algorithmcited by 723
  9. 2026SkillsBench: Benchmarking How Well Agent Skills Work Across Diverse Taskscited by 289
  10. 2026SkillRL: Evolving Agents via Recursive Skill-Augmented Reinforcement Learningcited by 252
  11. 2025R-Zero: Self-Evolving Reasoning LLM from Zero Datacited by 210
  12. 2026MemSkill: Learning and Evolving Memory Skills for Self-Evolving Agentscited by 129
26 more
  1. 2026SoK: Agentic Skills -- Beyond Tool Use in LLM Agentscited by 120
  2. 2026MemRL: Self-Evolving Agents via Runtime Reinforcement Learning on Episodic Memorycited by 113
  3. 2026Agent Skills for Large Language Models: Architecture, Acquisition, Security, and the Path Forwardcited by 105
  4. 2025Self-Rewarding Vision-Language Model via Reasoning Decompositioncited by 95
  5. 2025Reinforcement Learning for Self-Improving Agent with Skill Librarycited by 91
  6. 2025AgentEvolver: Towards Efficient Self-Evolving Agent Systemcited by 77
  7. 2026XSkill: Continual Learning from Experience and Skills in Multimodal Agentscited by 71
  8. 2024Scaling Instructable Agents Across Many Simulated Worldscited by 67
  9. 2023Language Instructed Reinforcement Learning for Human-AI Coordinationcited by 61
  10. 2025lmgame-Bench: How Good are LLMs at Playing Games?cited by 54
  11. 2025VisPlay: Self-Evolving Vision-Language Models from Imagescited by 42
  12. 2025Vision-Zero: Scalable VLM Self-Improvement via Strategic Gamified Self-Playcited by 37
  13. 2025CASCADE: Cumulative Agentic Skill Creation through Autonomous Development and Evolutioncited by 33
  14. 2025VideoGameBench: Can Vision-Language Models complete popular video games?cited by 29
  15. 2021Experience-Driven PCG via Reinforcement Learning: A Super Mario Bros Studycited by 25
  16. 2025PolySkill: Learning Generalizable Skills Through Polymorphic Abstractioncited by 25
  17. 2024Can VLMs Play Action Role-Playing Games? Take Black Myth Wukong as a Study Casecited by 23
  18. 2026MM-Zero: Self-Evolving Multi-Model Vision Language Models From Zero Datacited by 16
  19. 2018Intent-aware Multi-agent Reinforcement Learningcited by 12
  20. 2026UI-Mem: Self-Evolving Experience Memory for Online Reinforcement Learning in Mobile GUI Agentscited by 11
  21. 2026VisGym: Diverse, Customizable, Scalable Environments for Multimodal Agentscited by 9
  22. 2025Bayesian Social Deduction with Graph-Informed Language Modelscited by 8
  23. 2025MemWeaver: A Hierarchical Memory from Textual Interactive Behaviors for Personalized Generationcited by 8
  24. 2025Think in Games: Learning to Reason in Games via Reinforcement Learning with Large Language Modelscited by 7
  25. 2025Democratizing Diplomacy: A Harness for Evaluating Any Large Language Model on Full-Press Diplomacycited by 6
  26. 2026SCALAR: Learning and Composing Skills through LLM Guided Symbolic Planning and Deep RL Groundingcited by 4

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Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 13.

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  1. 2026SkillForge: Evolving Verifiable Skills for Reinforcement Learning Agents
  2. 2026Skill Self-Play: Pushing the Frontier of LLM Capability with Co-Evolving Skills
  3. 2024LLMArena: Assessing Capabilities of Large Language Models in Dynamic Multi-Agent Environments
  4. 2024Aligning Agents like Large Language Models
  5. 2026BotzoneBench: Scalable LLM Evaluation via Graded AI Anchors
  6. 2026SkillForge: Co-Evolving Skills and Agents via Dynamic Skill Lifecycles
  7. 2026SkillCommit: Evolving Agent Skills through Behaviorally Validated Scope Expansion
  8. 2024clembench-2024: A Challenging, Dynamic, Complementary, Multilingual Benchmark and Underlying Flexible Framework for LLMs as Multi-Action Agents