SkillOS: Learning Skill Curation for Self-Evolving Agents
On the map: LLM agents and tool use → Agent skill learning and evolution
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Abstract (arXiv)
LLM-based agents are increasingly deployed to handle streaming tasks, yet they often remain one-off problem solvers that fail to learn from past interactions. Reusable skills distilled from experience provide a natural substrate for self-evolution, where high-quality skill curation serves as the key bottleneck. Existing approaches either rely on manual skill curation, prescribe heuristic skill operations, or train for short-horizon skill operations. However, they still struggle to learn complex long-term curation policies from indirect and delayed feedback. To tackle this challenge, we propose SkillOS, an experience-driven RL training recipe for learning skill curation in self-evolving agents. SkillOS pairs a frozen agent executor that retrieves and applies skills with a trainable skill curator that updates an external SkillRepo from accumulated experience. To provide learning signals for curation, we design composite rewards and train on grouped task streams based on skill-relevant task dependencies, where earlier trajectories update the SkillRepo, and later related tasks evaluate these updates. Across multi-turn agentic tasks and single-turn reasoning tasks, SkillOS consistently outperforms memory-free and strong memory-based baselines in both effectiveness and efficiency, with the learned skill curator generalizing across different executor backbones and task domains. Further analyses show that the learned curator produces more targeted skill use, while the skills in SkillRepo evolve into more richly structured Markdown files that encode higher-level meta-skills over time.
Key facts. Cited by 49 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in Agent skill learning and evolution, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use. Builds on 56 of its 63 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 7 May 2026.
Builds on
56 of 63 references.
Closest ancestors · 8
Same direction, newest first
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Other references · 48
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Citing papers per year: 2026: 49.
49 papers.
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- 2026The Regression Tax: Decomposing Why Skills Help and Hurt LLM Agentscited by 5
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- 2026AgentStream: How Well Do Self-Evolving LLM Agents Perform Under Streaming Tasks?cited by 4
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- 2026Progressive Agent Skill Generation via Reinforcement Learningcited by 2
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- 2026Skill-3D: Evolving Scene-Aware Skills for Agentic 3D Spatial Reasoningcited by 1
- 2026Harnessing Agent Skills: Architectural Patterns and a Reference Architecture for Skill-Mediated LLM Agentscited by 1
- 2026Skillware: A Software Ontology and Engineering Lifecycle for Persistent Behavioral Artifactscited by 1
- 2026Rethinking Self-Evolution: A Constrained Exploration-Exploitation Process for Mitigating Skill Overfittingcited by 1
- 2026EvoHarness-RL: Learning Self-Evolving Runtime Harness for Long-Horizon LLM Agentscited by 1
- 2026SkillHEX: Improving Agent Skills via Hypothesis-Driven Autonomous Exploration and Exploitationcited by 1
- 2026SkillAligner: Treating Retrieved Skills as Adaptable Drafts at Execution Timecited by 1
- 2026From Interaction Traces to Persistent Skills: Online Evolution for Computer-Use Agentscited by 1
- 2026SkillPoison: Progressive Skill Poisoning via Successful Experiencescited by 1
- 2026Beyond Rubrics: Exploration-Guided Evaluation Skills for Reward Modelingcited by 0
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- 2026SkillEvo: Self-Renewing Evolution Gradients from Multi-Turn Interaction Feedbackcited by 0
- 2026VCE-Skill: Enhancing Skill Self-Evolution with Version-Change Experiencecited by 0
- 2026Auditing Self-Evolution in Financial Agents: Capability Gains, Security Drift, and Execution-Interface Mismatchcited by 0
- 2026Towards a Systems Foundation for Agentic Skills: Architecture, Lifecycle, and Securitycited by 0
- 2026Grounded Skill Synthesis from Code at Scale for Agentic Intelligencecited by 0
- 2026SkillSpec: Intent-Masked Specification Reasoning for Agent Skill Correctnesscited by 0
- 2026EnSIMem: Entity-Structured Indexing for Long-Term Agent Memorycited by 0
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- 2026SkillSpec: Consensus-Gated Agent Skill Evolution via Representation Specializationcited by 0
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- 2026SkillSandbox: Skill Verification via Dynamic Scenario Synthesis7 Oct 2026
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- 2026TeleTune: Evolving Agent Skills From Offline Telemetry4 Oct 2026
- 2026SkillSpec: Consensus-Gated Agent Skill Evolution via Representation Specialization30 Sep 2026
- 2026SkillFM: Generating Skills for LLM Agents via Latent Flow Matching30 Sep 2026
- 2026SkillCome: Group Contrast Skill Optimization with Dual Memory29 Sep 2026
- 2026EASE: Behavior-Adaptive Skill Curation for Self-Evolving Agents29 Sep 2026
- 2026R2 Flow: Recursive Self-Improvement via Recursive Skill Evolution27 Sep 2026
- 2026SkillVine: Agent Skill Evolution via Branching Exploration26 Sep 2026
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- 2026EnSIMem: Entity-Structured Indexing for Long-Term Agent Memory23 Sep 2026
- 2026Dream-RSI: Recursive Self-Improvement through Evolving Worlds14 Sep 2026
- 2026SkillAdam: Stable and Efficient Skill Evolution for Agents8 Sep 2026
- 2026SkillSpec: Intent-Masked Specification Reasoning for Agent Skill Correctness5 Sep 2026
- 2026Grounded Skill Synthesis from Code at Scale for Agentic Intelligence4 Sep 2026
- 2026From Interaction Traces to Persistent Skills: Online Evolution for Computer-Use Agents4 Sep 2026
- 2026SkillGLoW: Procedural-Family Skill Consolidation for Self-Improving Agents on Long-Horizon Task Streams2 Sep 2026
- 2026Towards a Systems Foundation for Agentic Skills: Architecture, Lifecycle, and Security30 Aug 2026
- 2026WikiSkill: Compiling Agent Experience into Persistent Knowledge for Skill Evolution27 Aug 2026
- 2026Auditing Self-Evolution in Financial Agents: Capability Gains, Security Drift, and Execution-Interface Mismatch18 Aug 2026
- 2026VCE-Skill: Enhancing Skill Self-Evolution with Version-Change Experience17 Aug 2026
- 2026SkillEvo: Self-Renewing Evolution Gradients from Multi-Turn Interaction Feedback13 Aug 2026
- 2026Rethinking Self-Evolving Agents: Do We Still Need Prescribed Optimization Pipelines?10 Aug 2026
- 2026SkillAligner: Treating Retrieved Skills as Adaptable Drafts at Execution Time7 Aug 2026
- 2026SkillTFM: Gated Skill Evolution for Training-Free Adaptation of Tabular Foundation Models6 Aug 2026
- 2026SkillHEX: Improving Agent Skills via Hypothesis-Driven Autonomous Exploration and Exploitation6 Aug 2026
- 2026EvoHarness-RL: Learning Self-Evolving Runtime Harness for Long-Horizon LLM Agents5 Aug 2026
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- 2026SkillRise: Agentic Reinforcement Learning for Cross-Task Skill Evolution29 Jul 2026
- 2026Rethinking Self-Evolution: A Constrained Exploration-Exploitation Process for Mitigating Skill Overfitting29 Jul 2026
- 2026The Regression Tax: Decomposing Why Skills Help and Hurt LLM Agents24 Jul 2026
- 2026PATS: Policy-Aware Training Scaffolding for Agentic Reinforcement Learning23 Jul 2026
- 2026Skillware: A Software Ontology and Engineering Lifecycle for Persistent Behavioral Artifacts21 Jul 2026
- 2026UCOB: Learning to Utilize and Evolve Agentic Skills via Credit-Aware On-Policy Bidirectional Self-Distillation28 Jun 2026
- 2026Hypothesis-Driven Skill Optimization for LLM Agents21 Jun 2026
- 2026VideoWeaver: Evaluating and Evolving Skills for Agentic Long Video Generation6 Jun 2026
- 2026Skill-3D: Evolving Scene-Aware Skills for Agentic 3D Spatial Reasoning5 Jun 2026
- 2026Beyond Rubrics: Exploration-Guided Evaluation Skills for Reward Modeling5 Jun 2026
- 2026Unsupervised Skill Discovery for Agentic Data Analysis4 Jun 2026
- 2026LatentSkill: From In-Context Textual Skills to In-Weight Latent Skills for LLM Agents4 Jun 2026
- 2026Harnessing Agent Skills: Architectural Patterns and a Reference Architecture for Skill-Mediated LLM Agents29 May 2026
- 2026MUSE-Autoskill: Self-Evolving Agents via Skill Creation, Memory, Management, and Evaluation26 May 2026
- 2026SkillsVote: Lifecycle Governance of Agent Skills from Collection, Recommendation to Evolution18 May 2026
- 2026MUSE-Autoskill: Self-Evolving Agents via Skill Creation, Memory, Management, and Evaluationcited by 27
- 2026SkillsVote: Lifecycle Governance of Agent Skills from Collection, Recommendation to Evolutioncited by 18
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- 2026LatentSkill: From In-Context Textual Skills to In-Weight Latent Skills for LLM Agentscited by 10
- 2026Hypothesis-Driven Skill Optimization for LLM Agentscited by 8
- 2026VideoWeaver: Evaluating and Evolving Skills for Agentic Long Video Generationcited by 7
- 2026The Regression Tax: Decomposing Why Skills Help and Hurt LLM Agentscited by 5
- 2026SkillRise: Agentic Reinforcement Learning for Cross-Task Skill Evolutioncited by 5
- 2026AgentStream: How Well Do Self-Evolving LLM Agents Perform Under Streaming Tasks?cited by 4
- 2026Rethinking Self-Evolving Agents: Do We Still Need Prescribed Optimization Pipelines?cited by 3
- 2026SkillAdam: Stable and Efficient Skill Evolution for Agentscited by 3
- 2026Unsupervised Skill Discovery for Agentic Data Analysiscited by 2
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- 2026SkillSpec: Consensus-Gated Agent Skill Evolution via Representation Specialization30 Sep 2026
- 2026SkillFM: Generating Skills for LLM Agents via Latent Flow Matching30 Sep 2026
- 2026R2 Flow: Recursive Self-Improvement via Recursive Skill Evolution27 Sep 2026
- 2026SkillVine: Agent Skill Evolution via Branching Exploration26 Sep 2026
- 2026Just-in-Time Memory: Learning to Curate Task-Adaptive Memory for LLM Agents23 Sep 2026
- 2026SkillAdam: Stable and Efficient Skill Evolution for Agents8 Sep 2026
- 2026Grounded Skill Synthesis from Code at Scale for Agentic Intelligence4 Sep 2026
- 2026From Interaction Traces to Persistent Skills: Online Evolution for Computer-Use Agents4 Sep 2026
- 2026SkillGLoW: Procedural-Family Skill Consolidation for Self-Improving Agents on Long-Horizon Task Streams2 Sep 2026
12 newest of 30 All 30 (JSON)
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- 2026Skillware: A Software Ontology and Engineering Lifecycle for Persistent Behavioral Artifactscited by 1
- 2026SkillAligner: Treating Retrieved Skills as Adaptable Drafts at Execution Timecited by 1
- 2026SkillTFM: Gated Skill Evolution for Training-Free Adaptation of Tabular Foundation Modelscited by 0
- 2026SkillEvo: Self-Renewing Evolution Gradients from Multi-Turn Interaction Feedbackcited by 0
- 2026VCE-Skill: Enhancing Skill Self-Evolution with Version-Change Experiencecited by 0
- 2026Auditing Self-Evolution in Financial Agents: Capability Gains, Security Drift, and Execution-Interface Mismatchcited by 0
- 2026SkillSpec: Intent-Masked Specification Reasoning for Agent Skill Correctnesscited by 0
- 2026EnSIMem: Entity-Structured Indexing for Long-Term Agent Memorycited by 0
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12 most cited of 15 All 15 (JSON)
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- 2026SkillCome: Group Contrast Skill Optimization with Dual Memory29 Sep 2026
- 2026EASE: Behavior-Adaptive Skill Curation for Self-Evolving Agents29 Sep 2026
- 2026EnSIMem: Entity-Structured Indexing for Long-Term Agent Memory23 Sep 2026
- 2026Dream-RSI: Recursive Self-Improvement through Evolving Worlds14 Sep 2026
- 2026SkillSpec: Intent-Masked Specification Reasoning for Agent Skill Correctness5 Sep 2026
- 2026WikiSkill: Compiling Agent Experience into Persistent Knowledge for Skill Evolution27 Aug 2026
- 2026Auditing Self-Evolution in Financial Agents: Capability Gains, Security Drift, and Execution-Interface Mismatch18 Aug 2026
- 2026VCE-Skill: Enhancing Skill Self-Evolution with Version-Change Experience17 Aug 2026
- 2026SkillEvo: Self-Renewing Evolution Gradients from Multi-Turn Interaction Feedback13 Aug 2026
- 2026SkillAligner: Treating Retrieved Skills as Adaptable Drafts at Execution Time7 Aug 2026
12 newest of 15 All 15 (JSON)
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