mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

SkillGym: Training Skill-Use Agents with Automatic Verifiable Environment Generation

arXiv 2609.37539 ↗First posted 29 Sep 2026cs.AIcited by 0

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

Abstract (arXiv)

Skills equip LLM agents with professional knowledge and guidance to complete long-horizon and complex tasks. Although skills have been widely adopted in recent agent paradigms and harnesses, how to synthesize reliable training data and how to train agents for skill use remain underexplored. In this work, we propose SkillGym, an automatic pipeline to build verifiable environments, collect trajectories, and train skill-use agents. SkillGym first crawls a large volume of skills from the internet, then keeps those whose workflows can run reproducibly offline. A builder-reviewer pipeline is used to construct difficulty-controlled tasks, spanning four task types, each with a reference solution and an executable verifier. With this pipeline, we build 6.8k environments and collect 19k verified successful trajectories for supervised finetuning. Finetuning on these trajectories improves LLMs of different families and sizes, from 2B to 122B parameters across four skill-use benchmarks; Our Qwen3.5-9B SFT model outperforms the 397B untrained model on two of them. Further analysis shows that training teaches agents to invoke skills, raising the rate of reading the relevant skill from 28% to 96%, and that the gains hold across reasoning structures, extending to task types that form a minority of the training data and to skills held out from training

Key facts. No citing papers in the map yet (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Agent skill learning and evolution, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use. Builds on 27 of its 35 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 29 Sep 2026.

Builds on

27 of 35 references.

Closest ancestors · 8

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2026SkillForge: Evolving Verifiable Skills for Reinforcement Learning Agents25 Aug
  2. 2026Skill-Use: Can LLMs Actually Use Skills in Agentic Harnesses?5 Aug
  3. 2026Skill-to-LoRA: From Using Skills to Learning Behaviors for Token-Efficient LLM Agents15 Jun
  4. 2026Skill1: Unified Evolution of Skill-Augmented Agents via Reinforcement Learning7 May
  5. 2026Organizing, Orchestrating, and Benchmarking Agent Skills at Ecosystem Scale2 Mar
  6. 2026SkillsBench: Benchmarking How Well Agent Skills Work Across Diverse Tasks13 Feb
  7. 2026SkillRL: Evolving Agents via Recursive Skill-Augmented Reinforcement Learning9 Feb
  8. 2025Reinforcement Learning for Self-Improving Agent with Skill Library18 Dec

Other references · 19

  1. 2023SWE-bench: Can Language Models Resolve Real-World GitHub Issues?cited by 3,193
  2. 2023Voyager: An Open-Ended Embodied Agent with Large Language Modelscited by 2,081
  3. 2024SWE-agent: Agent-Computer Interfaces Enable Automated Software Engineeringcited by 1,628
  4. 2020ALFWorld: Aligning Text and Embodied Environments for Interactive Learningcited by 1,143
  5. 2026DeepSeek-V4: Towards Highly Efficient Million-Token Context Intelligencecited by 877
  6. 2026GLM-5: from Vibe Coding to Agentic Engineeringcited by 502
  7. 2024TravelPlanner: A Benchmark for Real-World Planning with Language Agentscited by 385
  8. 2025WebShaper: Agentically Data Synthesizing via Information-Seeking Formalizationcited by 118
  9. 2026SWE-Skills-Bench: Do Agent Skills Actually Help in Real-World Software Engineering?cited by 72
  10. 2026Agent World Model: Infinity Synthetic Environments for Agentic Reinforcement Learningcited by 51
  11. 2025TaskCraft: Automated Generation of Agentic Taskscited by 46
  12. 2026EnvScaler: Scaling Tool-Interactive Environments for LLM Agent via Programmatic Synthesiscited by 46
7 more
  1. 2026Endless Terminals: Scaling RL Environments for Terminal Agentscited by 43
  2. 2024Graph-enhanced Large Language Models in Asynchronous Plan Reasoningcited by 37
  3. 2024Benchmarking Agentic Workflow Generationcited by 36
  4. 2026Agent-World: Scaling Real-World Environment Synthesis for Evolving General Agent Intelligencecited by 35
  5. 2026Toward Scalable Terminal Task Synthesis via Skill Graphscited by 16
  6. 2023Abductive Commonsense Reasoning Exploiting Mutually Exclusive Explanationscited by 11
  7. 2026CLI-Universe: Towards Verifiable Task Synthesis Engine for Terminal Agentscited by 7

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  1. 2026SkillGym: Internalizing Human Skills into LLMs for Real-World Problem Solving
  2. 2026SKT: Skill-Use Training at Scale via Verified Synthetic Data Generation
  3. 2026SkillCorpus: Consolidating and Evaluating the Open Skill Ecosystem for Real-World LLM Agents
  4. 2026SkillRouter: Skill Routing for LLM Agents at Scale
  5. 2026SkillRet: A Large-Scale Benchmark for Skill Retrieval in LLM Agents
  6. 2026SkillMaster: Toward Autonomous Skill Mastery in LLM Agents
  7. 2026SkillGen: Verified Inference-Time Agent Skill Synthesis
  8. 2026How Well Do Agentic Skills Work in the Wild: Benchmarking LLM Skill Usage in Realistic Settings