SkillAdaptor: Self-Adapting Skills for LLM Agents from Trajectories
On the map: LLM agents and tool use → Agent skill learning and evolution
Abstract (arXiv)
Large language model (LLM) agents increasingly rely on reusable external skills to solve long-horizon interactive tasks. Existing training-free skill adaptation pipelines usually update skills from full trajectories or session-level feedback, which makes failure attribution coarse and often produces unstable or overly broad revisions. We propose SkillAdaptor, a training-free step-level skill adaptation framework with explicit failure attribution, and it can plug into OpenClaw-class agent harnesses. Given a failed trajectory, SkillAdaptor identifies a first actionable fault step, links responsibility to candidate skills, and applies targeted updates under explicit acceptance checks while keeping the backbone frozen. We evaluate on WebShop, PinchBench, and Claw-Eval with Kimi-K2.5, GLM-5, and GPT-5.2. SkillAdaptor improves over no-skill and skill-adaptation baselines on all three suites, with the largest single-metric improvements of +1.5 points on PinchBench Avg Score%, +1.8 on Claw-Eval Avg Score, and +1.7 on WebShop success rate. These results indicate that step-level attribution supports more stable and auditable training-free skill maintenancefootnoteThe code will be released at https://github.com/zjunlp/SkillAdaptor..
Key facts. Cited by 11 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 19 of its 29 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 31 May 2026.
Builds on
19 of 29 references.
Closest ancestors · 6
Same direction, newest first
- 2026SkillsVote: Lifecycle Governance of Agent Skills from Collection, Recommendation to Evolution18 May
- 2026SkillForge: Forging Domain-Specific, Self-Evolving Agent Skills in Cloud Technical Support9 Apr
- 2026SkillClaw: Let Skills Evolve Collectively with Agentic Evolver9 Apr
- 2026How Well Do Agentic Skills Work in the Wild: Benchmarking LLM Skill Usage in Realistic Settings6 Apr
- 2026CoEvoSkills: Self-Evolving Agent Skills via Co-Evolutionary Verification2 Apr
- 2026SkillsBench: Benchmarking How Well Agent Skills Work Across Diverse Tasks13 Feb
Other references · 13
- 2022ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Modelscited by 8,695
- 2023Reflexion: Language Agents with Verbal Reinforcement Learningcited by 4,276
- 2023Toolformer: Language Models Can Teach Themselves to Use Toolscited by 4,182
- 2023Gorilla: Large Language Model Connected with Massive APIscited by 1,332
- 2022WebShop: Towards Scalable Real-World Web Interaction with Grounded Language Agentscited by 1,251
- 2025A-MEM: Agentic Memory for LLM Agentscited by 1,063
- 2023ExpeL: LLM Agents Are Experiential Learnerscited by 876
- 2026Agentic Harness Engineering: Observability-Driven Automatic Evolution of Coding-Agent Harnessescited by 142
- 2026Claw-Eval: Towards Trustworthy Evaluation of Autonomous Agentscited by 64
- 2026From Raw Experience to Skill Consumption: A Systematic Study of Model-Generated Agent Skillscited by 22
- 2026From Context to Skills: Can Language Models Learn from Context Skillfully?cited by 19
- 2026Library Drift: Diagnosing and Fixing a Silent Failure Mode in Self-Evolving LLM Skill Librariescited by 10
1 more
Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2026: 11.
11 papers.
- 2026SkillOpt-Lite: Better and Faster Agent Self-evolution via One Line of Vibecited by 20
- 2026Rethinking Self-Evolving Agent Skills: Feedback Dynamics over Multiple Roundscited by 7
- 2026Agent Skills Matter: Inferring Proprietary Skills from Execution Trajectoriescited by 4
- 2026Phantom Gains: Auditing Self-Improvement Against a Measured Nullcited by 2
- 2026The Blind Curator: How a Biased Judge Silently Disables Skill Retirement in Self-Evolving Agentscited by 1
- 2026Rethinking Self-Evolution: A Constrained Exploration-Exploitation Process for Mitigating Skill Overfittingcited by 1
- 2026Branch2Skill: Efficient Skill Evolution Through Reasoning Treescited by 0
- 2026Who Maintains Agent Skills? A Longitudinal Study of Human-Governed, AI-Assisted Skill Maintenancecited by 0
- 2026PluginRSI: Recursive Improvement of Agent Harnesses with Reusable Pluginscited by 0
- 2026EVISKILL: Grounding Skill Evolution in Replayable Evidencecited by 0
- 2026Trajectory-Guided Fault Localization for Agent Skill Evolutioncited by 0
- 2026Trajectory-Guided Fault Localization for Agent Skill Evolution8 Oct 2026
- 2026EVISKILL: Grounding Skill Evolution in Replayable Evidence4 Oct 2026
- 2026PluginRSI: Recursive Improvement of Agent Harnesses with Reusable Plugins26 Sep 2026
- 2026Who Maintains Agent Skills? A Longitudinal Study of Human-Governed, AI-Assisted Skill Maintenance4 Sep 2026
- 2026Phantom Gains: Auditing Self-Improvement Against a Measured Null20 Aug 2026
- 2026Branch2Skill: Efficient Skill Evolution Through Reasoning Trees9 Aug 2026
- 2026Rethinking Self-Evolving Agent Skills: Feedback Dynamics over Multiple Rounds31 Jul 2026
- 2026Rethinking Self-Evolution: A Constrained Exploration-Exploitation Process for Mitigating Skill Overfitting29 Jul 2026
- 2026Agent Skills Matter: Inferring Proprietary Skills from Execution Trajectories28 Jul 2026
- 2026The Blind Curator: How a Biased Judge Silently Disables Skill Retirement in Self-Evolving Agents8 Jul 2026
- 2026SkillOpt-Lite: Better and Faster Agent Self-evolution via One Line of Vibe3 Jul 2026
Similar, not cited
Close in wording, no citation either way
- 2026SkillCommit: Evolving Agent Skills through Behaviorally Validated Scope Expansion
- 2026SkillAxe: Sharpening LLM-Authored Agent Skills Through Evaluation-Guided Self-Refinement
- 2026SkillAdam: Stable and Efficient Skill Evolution for Agents
- 2026Skills-Coach: A Self-Evolving Skill Optimizer via Training-Free GRPO
- 2026SkillGym: Internalizing Human Skills into LLMs for Real-World Problem Solving
- 2025Adaptation of Agentic AI: A Survey of Post-Training, Memory, and Skills
- 2026Skill is Not One-Size-Fits-All: Model-Aware Skill Alignment for LLM Agents
- 2026SkillGym: Training Skill-Use Agents with Automatic Verifiable Environment Generation