mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

UniSkill: Learning Actor-Aligned Skill Proposals for an Evolving Policy

arXiv 2610.10164 ↗First posted 7 Oct 2026cs.AIcited by 0

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

Abstract (arXiv)

Large language model agents can improve across tasks by retaining reusable skills distilled from prior interactions. Recent work jointly optimizes task execution and skill extraction, enabling the policy and skillbank to co-evolve. However, as the actor continues learning, rewarding skill proposals through their reuse in subsequent training steps may conflate skill benefits with actor improvement, while directly testing each proposed skill requires costly additional actor rollouts. In this paper, we introduce UniSkill, which uses a shared policy to interact with the environment and propose skillbank edits (Add, Update, or No Edit) from the resulting trajectories. Specifically, the actor learns from environment rewards, while contrastive action feedback guides skill proposal learning. This feedback provides an actor-alignment signal by measuring how replacing the retrieved skill with a proposed skill changes the current actor's action log-likelihood gap between previously collected successful and failed trajectories from the same task, thereby avoiding new rollouts for each proposal. Since proposal-level feedback may suppress an otherwise appropriate edit operation when the proposed skill content scores poorly, we further apply skill-edit support regularization to preserve exploration. Empirically, UniSkill achieves strong performance, reaching 98.4% success on ALFWorld and 84.7% on WebShop while maintaining stable joint training. Further ALFWorld experiments show that UniSkill remains effective when the shared policy uses a smaller backbone. Our implementation is available at https://github.com/LimOkii/UniSKill.

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 16 of its 33 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 7 Oct 2026.

Builds on

16 of 33 references.

Closest ancestors · 8

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2026ReSkill: Reconciling Skill Creation with Policy Optimization in Agentic RL1 Jun
  2. 2026Skill is Not One-Size-Fits-All: Model-Aware Skill Alignment for LLM Agents29 May
  3. 2026SkillGraph: Skill-Augmented Reinforcement Learning for Agents via Evolving Skill Graphs12 May
  4. 2026Skill1: Unified Evolution of Skill-Augmented Agents via Reinforcement Learning7 May
  5. 2026Trace2Skill: Distill Trajectory-Local Lessons into Transferable Agent Skills26 Mar
  6. 2026ARISE: Agent Reasoning with Intrinsic Skill Evolution in Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning17 Mar
  7. 2026SkillRL: Evolving Agents via Recursive Skill-Augmented Reinforcement Learning9 Feb
  8. 2025Reinforcement Learning for Self-Improving Agent with Skill Library18 Dec

Other references · 8

  1. 2017Proximal Policy Optimization Algorithmscited by 14,441
  2. 2024DeepSeekMath: Pushing the Limits of Mathematical Reasoning in Open Language Modelscited by 8,851
  3. 2024Qwen2.5 Technical Reportcited by 4,713
  4. 2025REINFORCE++: Stabilizing Critic-Free Policy Optimization with Global Advantage Normalizationcited by 233
  5. 2025SkillWeaver: Web Agents can Self-Improve by Discovering and Honing Skillscited by 174
  6. 2026RetroAgent: From Solving to Evolving via Retrospective Dual Intrinsic Feedbackcited by 16
  7. 2026Evolving-RL: End-to-End Optimization of Experience-Driven Self-Evolving Capability within Agentscited by 7
  8. 2026Complementary RL: Towards Efficient Experience-Driven Agent Learningcited by 5

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  1. 2026Skill-R1: Agent Skill Evolution via Reinforcement Learning
  2. 2026SkillEvoReg: Regularizing Agent Skill Evolution Against Overfitting
  3. 2026SkillAdaptor: Self-Adapting Skills for LLM Agents from Trajectories
  4. 2026SkillComposer: Learning to Evolve Agent Skills for Specification and Generalization
  5. 2026ContinualSkillBench: Can LLM Agents Truly Evolve Their Capabilities?
  6. 2026SkillRise: Agentic Reinforcement Learning for Cross-Task Skill Evolution
  7. 2026SkillForge: Co-Evolving Skills and Agents via Dynamic Skill Lifecycles
  8. 2026SkillFocus: Evolving Agent Skills via Capability Decomposition