mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

SkillAdaptor: Self-Adapting Skills for LLM Agents from Trajectories

arXiv 2606.01311 ↗First posted 31 May 2026cs.CL cs.AI cs.LGcited by 11

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

  1. 2026SkillsVote: Lifecycle Governance of Agent Skills from Collection, Recommendation to Evolution18 May
  2. 2026SkillForge: Forging Domain-Specific, Self-Evolving Agent Skills in Cloud Technical Support9 Apr
  3. 2026SkillClaw: Let Skills Evolve Collectively with Agentic Evolver9 Apr
  4. 2026How Well Do Agentic Skills Work in the Wild: Benchmarking LLM Skill Usage in Realistic Settings6 Apr
  5. 2026CoEvoSkills: Self-Evolving Agent Skills via Co-Evolutionary Verification2 Apr
  6. 2026SkillsBench: Benchmarking How Well Agent Skills Work Across Diverse Tasks13 Feb

Other references · 13

  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. 2023Gorilla: Large Language Model Connected with Massive APIscited by 1,332
  5. 2022WebShop: Towards Scalable Real-World Web Interaction with Grounded Language Agentscited by 1,251
  6. 2025A-MEM: Agentic Memory for LLM Agentscited by 1,063
  7. 2023ExpeL: LLM Agents Are Experiential Learnerscited by 876
  8. 2026Agentic Harness Engineering: Observability-Driven Automatic Evolution of Coding-Agent Harnessescited by 142
  9. 2026Claw-Eval: Towards Trustworthy Evaluation of Autonomous Agentscited by 64
  10. 2026From Raw Experience to Skill Consumption: A Systematic Study of Model-Generated Agent Skillscited by 22
  11. 2026From Context to Skills: Can Language Models Learn from Context Skillfully?cited by 19
  12. 2026Library Drift: Diagnosing and Fixing a Silent Failure Mode in Self-Evolving LLM Skill Librariescited by 10
1 more
  1. 2025Co-Evolving Agents: Learning from Failures as Hard Negativescited by 8

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 11.

11 papers.

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2026SkillCommit: Evolving Agent Skills through Behaviorally Validated Scope Expansion
  2. 2026SkillAxe: Sharpening LLM-Authored Agent Skills Through Evaluation-Guided Self-Refinement
  3. 2026SkillAdam: Stable and Efficient Skill Evolution for Agents
  4. 2026Skills-Coach: A Self-Evolving Skill Optimizer via Training-Free GRPO
  5. 2026SkillGym: Internalizing Human Skills into LLMs for Real-World Problem Solving
  6. 2025Adaptation of Agentic AI: A Survey of Post-Training, Memory, and Skills
  7. 2026Skill is Not One-Size-Fits-All: Model-Aware Skill Alignment for LLM Agents
  8. 2026SkillGym: Training Skill-Use Agents with Automatic Verifiable Environment Generation