mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

SkillLens: Adaptive Multi-Granularity Skill Reuse for Cost-Efficient LLM Agents

arXiv 2605.08386 ↗First posted 8 May 2026cs.AIcited by 6

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

Abstract (arXiv)

Skill libraries have become a practical way for LLM agents to reuse procedural experience across tasks. However, existing systems typically treat skills as flat, single-resolution prompt blocks. This creates a tension between relevance and cost: injecting coarse skills can introduce irrelevant or misleading context, while rewriting entire skills is expensive and often unnecessary. We propose SkillLens, a hierarchical skill-evolution framework that organizes skills into a four-layer graph of policies, strategies, procedures, and primitives, and retrieves them at mixed granularity. Given a task, SkillLens first retrieves semantically relevant skill seeds, expands them through degree-corrected random walk over the skill graph, and then uses a verifier to decide whether each visited unit should be accepted, decomposed, rewritten, or skipped. This enables the agent to reuse compatible subskills directly while adapting only locally mismatched components. To improve the system over time, SkillLens further refines multi-granularity skills and verifier in order to improve its routing decisions. We provide theoretical analysis showing that mixed-granularity adaptation incurs sublinear cost under sparse mismatch assumptions and that the evolutionary update rule monotonically improves the validation objective until a local optimum. Across MuLocbench and ALFWorld, SkillLens consistently improves over strong skill-based baselines, achieving up to a 6.31 percentage-point Acc@1 gain for bug localization and raising agent success rate from 45.00% to 51.31%.

Key facts. Cited by 6 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 26 of its 41 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 8 May 2026.

Builds on

26 of 41 references.

Closest ancestors · 4

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2026How Well Do Agentic Skills Work in the Wild: Benchmarking LLM Skill Usage in Realistic Settings6 Apr
  2. 2026CoEvoSkills: Self-Evolving Agent Skills via Co-Evolutionary Verification2 Apr
  3. 2026EvoSkill: Automated Skill Discovery for Multi-Agent Systems3 Mar
  4. 2026Agent Skills for Large Language Models: Architecture, Acquisition, Security, and the Path Forward12 Feb

Other references · 22

  1. 2022ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Modelscited by 8,695
  2. 2023Reflexion: Language Agents with Verbal Reinforcement Learningcited by 4,276
  3. 2023Toolformer: Language Models Can Teach Themselves to Use Toolscited by 4,182
  4. 2023Self-Refine: Iterative Refinement with Self-Feedbackcited by 3,442
  5. 2023Voyager: An Open-Ended Embodied Agent with Large Language Modelscited by 2,191
  6. 2024SWE-agent: Agent-Computer Interfaces Enable Automated Software Engineeringcited by 1,737
  7. 2020ALFWorld: Aligning Text and Embodied Environments for Interactive Learningcited by 1,205
  8. 2025A-MEM: Agentic Memory for LLM Agentscited by 1,063
  9. 2023ExpeL: LLM Agents Are Experiential Learnerscited by 876
  10. 2025Mem0: Building Production-Ready AI Agents with Scalable Long-Term Memorycited by 779
  11. 2024A Survey on the Memory Mechanism of Large Language Model based Agentscited by 634
  12. 2024Executable Code Actions Elicit Better LLM Agentscited by 564
10 more
  1. 2023MemoryBank: Enhancing Large Language Models with Long-Term Memorycited by 556
  2. 2024Agentless: Demystifying LLM-based Software Engineering Agentscited by 421
  3. 2023RepoCoder: Repository-Level Code Completion Through Iterative Retrieval and Generationcited by 367
  4. 2017FeUdal Networks for Hierarchical Reinforcement Learningcited by 337
  5. 2026AutoSkill: Experience-Driven Lifelong Learning via Skill Self-Evolutioncited by 115
  6. 2025Memp: Exploring Agent Procedural Memorycited by 103
  7. 2026Memory for Autonomous LLM Agents:Mechanisms, Evaluation, and Emerging Frontierscited by 65
  8. 2024AutoManual: Constructing Instruction Manuals by LLM Agents via Interactive Environmental Learningcited by 61
  9. 2018Improving IR-Based Bug Localization with Context-Aware Query Reformulationcited by 11
  10. 2025A Benchmark for Localizing Code and Non-Code Issues in Software Projectscited by 4

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 6.

6 papers.

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2026Skill is Not One-Size-Fits-All: Model-Aware Skill Alignment for LLM Agents
  2. 2026SkillsInjector: Dynamic Skill Context Construction for LLM Agents
  3. 2026SkillRouter: Skill Routing for LLM Agents at Scale
  4. 2026SkillCommit: Evolving Agent Skills through Behaviorally Validated Scope Expansion
  5. 2026SkillRet: A Large-Scale Benchmark for Skill Retrieval in LLM Agents
  6. 2026GraSP: Graph-Structured Skill Compositions for LLM Agents
  7. 2026ContinualSkillBench: Can LLM Agents Truly Evolve Their Capabilities?
  8. 2026SkillCorpus: Consolidating and Evaluating the Open Skill Ecosystem for Real-World LLM Agents