COBRA‑Skills is a new framework that treats skill optimization for large language model agents as a budgeted sequential problem over a dynamically evolving candidate set. It uses contextual‑bandit prioritization to focus evaluations on promising or informative candidates and refines the skill population based on execution feedback. In experiments across six agent benchmarks and three target models, COBRA‑Skills outperforms existing methods, cuts optimization cost by 55–58 % compared to SkillOpt, and requires only 50 unique optimization examples per benchmark.
arXiv:2607. 29241v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Optimizing modern recommender models still depends heavily on engineers manually iterating over architectural, objective, and training-strategy changes.
arXiv:2607. 26643v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Enabling large language model (LLM) agents to accumulate and reuse experience from past interactions remains a central challenge in real-world applications.
SkillLift introduces a method for efficiently evolving reusable procedural prompts (skills) in large language model agents by learning a dense rubric that aligns with sparse oracle evaluations. Instead of directly revising skill text based on costly full agent rollouts, the approach decouples skill search from oracle cost through a bilevel optimization framework: an inner loop uses a frozen rubric as a cheap surrogate to guide skill updates, while an outer loop periodically realigns the rubric using a small number of oracle rollouts via rank correlation. Experiments on complex agent task benchmarks demonstrate that SkillLift outperforms existing auto-skill methods while reducing token cost by 40–70% compared to frontier-evolving approaches.
Enabling large language model (LLM) agents to accumulate and reuse experience from past interactions remains a central challenge in real-world applications. A promising solution is to treat skills as trainable states and optimize them in the same way as model parameters in neural network training.
arXiv:2608. 05628v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Although agent skills equip LLMs with reusable procedural knowledge, manual maintenance suffers from high costs, unscalability, and misalignment.
Large language model (LLM)-driven evolution has shown promise for program search and algorithm discovery, but relying on strong models throughout long evolutionary runs is costly. A natural alternative is to combine cheap and strong models under a fixed inference budget.
arXiv:2608. 05651v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language model (LLM)-driven evolution has shown promise for program search and algorithm discovery, but relying on strong models throughout long evolutionary runs is costly.
arXiv:2607. 09015v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study contextual bandit problems with correlated arms and access to surrogate reward signals produced by a machine learning model, motivated by applications such as large language model (LLM) routing.
arXiv:2605.29268v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: LLM-guided evolutionary search (Evolve systems) has reached state-of-the-art results on mathematical and combinatorial tasks, yet most existi...
Although agent skills equip LLMs with reusable procedural knowledge, manual maintenance suffers from high costs, unscalability, and misalignment. Real-world deployments thus require autonomous, on-demand skill evolution at test time, constrained by limited interaction budgets and a lack of training or validation sets.
arXiv:2608. 20169v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present a novel approach to efficient LLM agent harness optimization through adaptive validation task selection.
arXiv:2608. 15071v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Learning from experience is critical for developing capable, self-improving large language model (LLM) agents.