mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

SkillAudit: Ground-Truth-Free Skill Evolution via Paired Trajectory Auditing

arXiv 2606.14239 ↗First posted 12 Jun 2026cs.AIcited by 11

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

  1. 2026SkillRevise: Improving LLM-Authored Agent Skills via Trace-Conditioned Skill Revision31 May
  2. 2026Skills on the Fly: Test-Time Adaptive Skill Synthesis for LLM Agents16 May
  3. 2026Skill1: Unified Evolution of Skill-Augmented Agents via Reinforcement Learning7 May
  4. 2026SkillForge: Forging Domain-Specific, Self-Evolving Agent Skills in Cloud Technical Support9 Apr
  5. 2026CoEvoSkills: Self-Evolving Agent Skills via Co-Evolutionary Verification2 Apr
  6. 2026Trace2Skill: Distill Trajectory-Local Lessons into Transferable Agent Skills26 Mar
  7. 2026EvoSkill: Automated Skill Discovery for Multi-Agent Systems3 Mar
  8. 2026SkillsBench: Benchmarking How Well Agent Skills Work Across Diverse Tasks13 Feb
  9. 2026SkillRL: Evolving Agents via Recursive Skill-Augmented Reinforcement Learning9 Feb
  10. 2025Reinforcement Learning for Self-Improving Agent with Skill Library18 Dec

Other references · 18

  1. 2022ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Modelscited by 8,355
  2. 2023Reflexion: Language Agents with Verbal Reinforcement Learningcited by 4,064
  3. 2023Let's Verify Step by Stepcited by 3,598
  4. 2023Self-Refine: Iterative Refinement with Self-Feedbackcited by 3,317
  5. 2023Voyager: An Open-Ended Embodied Agent with Large Language Modelscited by 2,081
  6. 2023ExpeL: LLM Agents Are Experiential Learnerscited by 814
  7. 2023DSPy: Compiling Declarative Language Model Calls into Self-Improving Pipelinescited by 803
  8. 2026Terminal-Bench: Benchmarking Agents on Hard, Realistic Tasks in Command Line Interfacescited by 515
  9. 2025GEPA: Reflective Prompt Evolution Can Outperform Reinforcement Learningcited by 449
  10. 2025Agentic Context Engineering: Evolving Contexts for Self-Improving Language Modelscited by 349
  11. 2024Agent Workflow Memorycited by 342
  12. 2025SkillWeaver: Web Agents can Self-Improve by Discovering and Honing Skillscited by 174
6 more
  1. 2026MemSkill: Learning and Evolving Memory Skills for Self-Evolving Agentscited by 129
  2. 2026AutoSkill: Experience-Driven Lifelong Learning via Skill Self-Evolutioncited by 105
  3. 2025Process Reward Models for LLM Agents: Practical Framework and Directionscited by 81
  4. 2026Skill-SD: Skill-Conditioned Self-Distillation for Multi-turn LLM Agentscited by 75
  5. 2026SKILLFOUNDRY: Building Self-Evolving Agent Skill Libraries from Heterogeneous Scientific Resourcescited by 38
  6. 2026SkillEvolver: Skill Learning as a Meta-Skillcited by 12

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 11.

11 papers.

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2026SkillCoach: Self-Evolving Rubrics for Evaluating and Enhancing Agentic Skill-Use
  2. 2026SkillGen: Verified Inference-Time Agent Skill Synthesis
  3. 2026MetaSkill-Evolve: Recursive Self-Improvement of LLM Agents via Two-Timescale Meta-Skill Evolution
  4. 2026SkillFocus: Evolving Agent Skills via Capability Decomposition
  5. 2026SkillProx: Self-Evolving Agent Skills via Proximal Textual Gradient Descent
  6. 2026Counterfactual Trace Auditing of LLM Agent Skills
  7. 2026SkillCAT: Contrastive, Assessment-Augmented and Topology-AwareSkill Self-Evolution for LLM Agents
  8. 2026SkillAudit: From Fixed-Suite Benchmarking to Skill-Centered Assessment