mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

Trajectory-Guided Fault Localization for Agent Skill Evolution

arXiv 2610.11858 ↗First posted 8 Oct 2026cs.SE cs.AIcited by 0

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

Abstract (arXiv)

Agent skills provide reusable guidance for code agents, but incomplete or unsuitable guidance can impair task execution. To reduce the manual effort of skill refinement, recent approaches use LLMs to generate revisions from execution feedback. However, grounding these revisions in explicit behavioral evidence remains challenging. To address this gap, we propose SkillMorph, a skill-evolution approach based on trajectory-guided fault localization in agent skills. Its core idea is to link execution evidence to specific skill contents before generating revisions. Specifically, SkillMorph compares failure and success evidence in abstracted trajectories across repeated runs and tasks, incorporating changes between evolution loops to identify suspicious actions. It then uses these suspicious actions to localize edit sites in the skills and generate corresponding revisions. Experiments on SWE-Skills-Bench and CannBot show that the skills evolved by SkillMorph consistently achieve higher trial-level accuracy and execution consistency than the original skills and those from four existing skill-evolution methods. We have also applied SkillMorph to automated kernel generation with an AI operator-development team, which has accepted 6 skill-revision pull requests.

Key facts. No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in Agent skill learning and evolution, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use. Builds on 22 of its 51 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 8 Oct 2026.

Builds on

22 of 51 references.

Closest ancestors · 12

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2026SkillAdam: Stable and Efficient Skill Evolution for Agents8 Sep
  2. 2026From Anatomy to Smells: An Empirical Study of SKILL.md in Agent Skills1 Jul
  3. 2026SkillAxe: Sharpening LLM-Authored Agent Skills Through Evaluation-Guided Self-Refinement9 Jun
  4. 2026SkillAdaptor: Self-Adapting Skills for LLM Agents from Trajectories31 May
  5. 2026SkillRevise: Improving LLM-Authored Agent Skills via Trace-Conditioned Skill Revision31 May
  6. 2026SkillGrad: Optimizing Agent Skills Like Gradient Descent26 May
  7. 2026SkillOpt: Executive Strategy for Self-Evolving Agent Skills22 May
  8. 2026CoEvoSkills: Self-Evolving Agent Skills via Co-Evolutionary Verification2 Apr
  9. 2026Trace2Skill: Distill Trajectory-Local Lessons into Transferable Agent Skills26 Mar
  10. 2026EvoSkill: Automated Skill Discovery for Multi-Agent Systems3 Mar
  11. 2026SkillsBench: Benchmarking How Well Agent Skills Work Across Diverse Tasks13 Feb
  12. 2026Agent Skills for Large Language Models: Architecture, Acquisition, Security, and the Path Forward12 Feb

Other references · 10

  1. 2021Evaluating Large Language Models Trained on Codecited by 8,320
  2. 2026DeepSeek-V4: Towards Highly Efficient Million-Token Context Intelligencecited by 1,040
  3. 2026SWE-Skills-Bench: Do Agent Skills Actually Help in Real-World Software Engineering?cited by 82
  4. 2025Understanding Code Agent Behaviour: An Empirical Study of Success and Failure Trajectoriescited by 33
  5. 2026CodeTracer: Towards Traceable Agent Statescited by 16
  6. 2026SkillEvolver: Skill Learning as a Meta-Skillcited by 16
  7. 2026A Self-Evolving Framework for Efficient Terminal Agents via Observational Context Compressioncited by 15
  8. 2026ContractSkill: Repairable Contract-Based Skills for Multimodal Web Agentscited by 13
  9. 2026Failure as a Process: An Anatomy of CLI Coding Agent Trajectoriescited by 13
  10. 2026Skills-Coach: A Self-Evolving Skill Optimizer via Training-Free GRPOcited by 8

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  1. 2026SkillAudit: Ground-Truth-Free Skill Evolution via Paired Trajectory Auditing
  2. 2026A Wrong Turn Does Not Ruin the Journey: Deviation-Guided Skill Self-Evolution for LLM Agents
  3. 2026SkillFocus: Evolving Agent Skills via Capability Decomposition
  4. 2026Agent Skills Can Be Harmful: An Empirical Study of Skill-Induced Failures in LLM Agents
  5. 2026SkillCoach: Self-Evolving Rubrics for Evaluating and Enhancing Agentic Skill-Use
  6. 2026Rep2Skill: Representation-Guided Skill Self-Evolution for LLM Agents
  7. 2026MetaSkill-Evolve: Recursive Self-Improvement of LLM Agents via Two-Timescale Meta-Skill Evolution
  8. 2026SkillProx: Self-Evolving Agent Skills via Proximal Textual Gradient Descent