SkillSmith: Co-Evolving Skills and Tools for Self-Improving Agent Systems
arXiv:2606. 01314v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent self-evolving agents have shown that skills can be discovered, refined, and accumulated through execution.
arXiv:2604. 08377v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language model (LLM) agents such as OpenClaw rely on reusable skills to perform complex tasks, yet these skills remain largely static after deployment.
arXiv:2606. 01314v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent self-evolving agents have shown that skills can be discovered, refined, and accumulated through execution.
arXiv:2608. 15165v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language model (LLM) agents can continually improve without parameter updates by converting historical experience into reusable procedural knowledge.
arXiv:2606. 03692v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent AI agents can flexibly invoke skills to solve complex tasks, but their long-term improvement is fundamentally constrained by a lack of systematic skill construction, accumulation, and transfer.
arXiv:2605. 18401v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Long-horizon LLM agents generate traces that could become reusable experience, but raw trajectories are noisy, local, and hard to govern.
Agent skills represent a standardized format for packaging procedural knowledge and domain expertise, serving within agent harness systems as an essential mechanism to continually constrain a language model's behavior space for repeatable, high-quality task execution. However, because strong closed-source models entail high inference costs, current popular agent harnesses, such as Codex and OpenClaw, remain prohibitively expensive when deploying these skills to accomplish real-world tasks.
The paper introduces an online skill‑evolution framework that transforms interaction traces and evaluator feedback into a persistent, versioned library of reusable procedures for computer‑use agents. By executing each iteration against a frozen library snapshot, the system updates skills without altering the underlying model parameters. Experiments across four OSWorld domains show that the evolving library consistently outperforms an empty‑library baseline, with gains ranging from 5.7 to 18.6 percentage points, while also revealing domain‑specific temporal stability and challenges in skill retrieval and revision.
arXiv:2602. 12430v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The transition from monolithic language models to modular, skill-equipped agents marks a defining shift in how large language models (LLMs) are deployed in practice.
arXiv:2609.04280v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Modern LLM-based agents operate through a harness of tools, reusable skills, and specialist agents that shapes what they observe and what the...
EVOHARNESSBENCH is a new benchmark that tests how LLM-based agents handle changes in their tool, skill, and agent harnesses over time. It includes 17 deterministic harness streams with 802 tasks, 520 tools, 42 skills, and 62 agents, and evaluates agents in two settings: deployment evaluation and self‑evolving adaptation evaluation. The study finds that harness expansion can cause forgetting, adaptation gains are inconsistent, and preserving old competence does not always aid new capability adaptation, highlighting harness evolution as a distinct challenge for agent development.
arXiv:2606. 17819v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Agent skills -- structured, reusable knowledge artifacts that augment LLM agent capabilities -- have been rapidly adopted in industry, yet their cross-domain impact and use across commercial and open-source models remain under-studied, and no reusable methodology exists for evaluating an individual skill.
arXiv:2608. 04968v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The capabilities of an LLM agent depend not only on its model but on the harness: the executable program that constructs context, invokes tools, verifies results, and recovers from failure.
arXiv:2608. 03874v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Modern agent frameworks equip large language models with external skill libraries to solve complex tasks.