SkillAudit: Ground-Truth-Free Skill Evolution via Paired Trajectory Auditing
On the map: LLM agents and tool use → Agent skill learning and evolution
Abstract (arXiv)
Agent skills provide LLM agents with reusable procedures, but a given skill may be incomplete, ineffective, or misleading for the current task. Existing methods for revising skills typically rely on external outcome supervision, such as task rewards, performance on a separate validation set, or feedback from deployment, to decide which updates to retain. However, this supervision may be costly or unavailable when adapting a skill to a new task. Using execution behavior as an alternative signal is challenging: a single run reflects the combined effects of the agent, task, and workspace, making the skill's contribution difficult to isolate. Comparing executions with and without the skill, while holding these factors fixed, provides evidence about how the skill changes behavior. We introduce SelfEvoSkill, which links these behavioral differences to relevant skill passages and iteratively revises and reevaluates those passages through subsequent executions. Checks derived once from the task's explicit requirements prevent revisions from violating task constraints. Across 89 containerized tasks in 8 professional domains, under the same best-of-two evaluation budget, SelfEvoSkill attains a 73.9% mean task reward, exceeding the no-skill condition by +33.0 percentage points and the benchmark's curated skill by +17.2 percentage points, while skill evolution receives neither task rewards nor benchmark verifier outputs. In controlled ablations, using two with-skill runs instead of a matched with/without-skill pair reduces mean reward by 4.6 percentage points, while limiting revision to one round reduces it by 9.0 points relative to repeated revision. Together, these results show that behavioral differences between matched executions can provide an effective signal for revising skills when outcome supervision is unavailable.
Key facts. Cited by 11 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Agent skill learning and evolution, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use. Builds on 28 of its 40 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 12 Jun 2026.
Builds on
28 of 40 references.
Closest ancestors · 10
Same direction, newest first
- 2026SkillRevise: Improving LLM-Authored Agent Skills via Trace-Conditioned Skill Revision31 May
- 2026Skills on the Fly: Test-Time Adaptive Skill Synthesis for LLM Agents16 May
- 2026Skill1: Unified Evolution of Skill-Augmented Agents via Reinforcement Learning7 May
- 2026SkillForge: Forging Domain-Specific, Self-Evolving Agent Skills in Cloud Technical Support9 Apr
- 2026CoEvoSkills: Self-Evolving Agent Skills via Co-Evolutionary Verification2 Apr
- 2026Trace2Skill: Distill Trajectory-Local Lessons into Transferable Agent Skills26 Mar
- 2026EvoSkill: Automated Skill Discovery for Multi-Agent Systems3 Mar
- 2026SkillsBench: Benchmarking How Well Agent Skills Work Across Diverse Tasks13 Feb
- 2026SkillRL: Evolving Agents via Recursive Skill-Augmented Reinforcement Learning9 Feb
- 2025Reinforcement Learning for Self-Improving Agent with Skill Library18 Dec
Other references · 18
- 2022ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Modelscited by 8,355
- 2023Reflexion: Language Agents with Verbal Reinforcement Learningcited by 4,064
- 2023Let's Verify Step by Stepcited by 3,598
- 2023Self-Refine: Iterative Refinement with Self-Feedbackcited by 3,317
- 2023Voyager: An Open-Ended Embodied Agent with Large Language Modelscited by 2,081
- 2023ExpeL: LLM Agents Are Experiential Learnerscited by 814
- 2023DSPy: Compiling Declarative Language Model Calls into Self-Improving Pipelinescited by 803
- 2026Terminal-Bench: Benchmarking Agents on Hard, Realistic Tasks in Command Line Interfacescited by 515
- 2025GEPA: Reflective Prompt Evolution Can Outperform Reinforcement Learningcited by 449
- 2025Agentic Context Engineering: Evolving Contexts for Self-Improving Language Modelscited by 349
- 2024Agent Workflow Memorycited by 342
- 2025SkillWeaver: Web Agents can Self-Improve by Discovering and Honing Skillscited by 174
6 more
- 2026MemSkill: Learning and Evolving Memory Skills for Self-Evolving Agentscited by 129
- 2026AutoSkill: Experience-Driven Lifelong Learning via Skill Self-Evolutioncited by 105
- 2025Process Reward Models for LLM Agents: Practical Framework and Directionscited by 81
- 2026Skill-SD: Skill-Conditioned Self-Distillation for Multi-turn LLM Agentscited by 75
- 2026SKILLFOUNDRY: Building Self-Evolving Agent Skill Libraries from Heterogeneous Scientific Resourcescited by 38
- 2026SkillEvolver: Skill Learning as a Meta-Skillcited by 12
Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2026: 11.
11 papers.
- 2026Rethinking Self-Evolving Agents: Do We Still Need Prescribed Optimization Pipelines?cited by 3
- 2026Practice Makes Unsafe: Skill Misevolution in Self-Improving LLM Agentscited by 2
- 2026SkillAligner: Treating Retrieved Skills as Adaptable Drafts at Execution Timecited by 1
- 2026Bidirectional Context Self-Distillation for Reinforcement Learning of Skill-Based LLM Agentscited by 1
- 2026Self-Supervised Skill Optimizationcited by 0
- 2026Testing and Evaluation of Agentic AI Systems In Military Command and Controlcited by 0
- 2026Self-Evolving Skills via Surrogate-Guided Solve-and-Reproducecited by 0
- 2026Designer-RSI: Evolving Procedural Memory from User Traffic for Agentic Graphic Designcited by 0
- 2026A Wrong Turn Does Not Ruin the Journey: Deviation-Guided Skill Self-Evolution for LLM Agentscited by 0
- 2026EvoSteer: Online Self-Evolving Graph Orchestration via Reference-Anchored Credit Assignmentcited by 0
- 2026Causal Memory Policy: Making Memory Utility Identifiable by Intervening on Retrievalcited by 0
- 2026Causal Memory Policy: Making Memory Utility Identifiable by Intervening on Retrieval1 Oct 2026
- 2026EvoSteer: Online Self-Evolving Graph Orchestration via Reference-Anchored Credit Assignment29 Sep 2026
- 2026A Wrong Turn Does Not Ruin the Journey: Deviation-Guided Skill Self-Evolution for LLM Agents24 Sep 2026
- 2026Designer-RSI: Evolving Procedural Memory from User Traffic for Agentic Graphic Design18 Sep 2026
- 2026Testing and Evaluation of Agentic AI Systems In Military Command and Control20 Aug 2026
- 2026Practice Makes Unsafe: Skill Misevolution in Self-Improving LLM Agents13 Aug 2026
- 2026Self-Evolving Skills via Surrogate-Guided Solve-and-Reproduce10 Aug 2026
- 2026Rethinking Self-Evolving Agents: Do We Still Need Prescribed Optimization Pipelines?10 Aug 2026
- 2026Bidirectional Context Self-Distillation for Reinforcement Learning of Skill-Based LLM Agents10 Aug 2026
- 2026SkillAligner: Treating Retrieved Skills as Adaptable Drafts at Execution Time7 Aug 2026
- 2026Self-Supervised Skill Optimization30 Jul 2026
Similar, not cited
Close in wording, no citation either way
- 2026SkillCoach: Self-Evolving Rubrics for Evaluating and Enhancing Agentic Skill-Use
- 2026SkillGen: Verified Inference-Time Agent Skill Synthesis
- 2026MetaSkill-Evolve: Recursive Self-Improvement of LLM Agents via Two-Timescale Meta-Skill Evolution
- 2026SkillFocus: Evolving Agent Skills via Capability Decomposition
- 2026SkillProx: Self-Evolving Agent Skills via Proximal Textual Gradient Descent
- 2026Counterfactual Trace Auditing of LLM Agent Skills
- 2026SkillCAT: Contrastive, Assessment-Augmented and Topology-AwareSkill Self-Evolution for LLM Agents
- 2026SkillAudit: From Fixed-Suite Benchmarking to Skill-Centered Assessment