D‑Skill is a framework that distills the behavioral advantage of a large language‑model teacher into an interpretable natural‑language skill document, using only paired rollouts and no weight updates. The skill is constructed offline from fixed trajectories, then provided to a smaller student model at inference time. Across benchmarks such as SpreadsheetBench‑Verified, ALFWorld, and chess puzzles, D‑Skill closes 75‑95% of the teacher‑student performance gap and reduces inference cost by 5.7×–8.3× compared to the teacher.
By Shuo Yuan, Dacheng Li, Joseph E. Gonzalez
Learn2Play Bench is a new benchmark that tests how well large language model agents learn from experience in unfamiliar, text‑based games with novel or counterintuitive rules. The benchmark provides reproducible feedback, automatic scoring, and varied game instances to evaluate learning across repeated attempts and transfer to new situations. Findings show that retaining full action records aids learning, human players outperform agents, and the choice of harness significantly impacts performance and inference cost.
By Yibo Li, Jinhang Qiu, Zhi Zheng, Qianyun Guo, Jiaying Wu, Shuo Ji, Bryan Hooi
arXiv:2607. 06854v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning agents for imperfect-information card games are only as strong as the opponents they train against, and they are hard to grade, since they beat a random opponent over 99 percent of the time and only tie copies of themselves.
By Nima Kelidari, Mohammadsaeed Haghi, Mahdi Salmani
arXiv:2610.03695v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Modern chess engines are silent experts: they play at a superhuman level, but do not offer explanations for their play. On the other hand, language mod...
By Adithya Bhaskar, Jeffrey Cheng, Danqi Chen
The paper investigates whether large language models (LLMs) exhibit language‑specific skill differences by having two identical model instances play a text‑based game in different languages. Using a multilingual extension of TextArena, the authors evaluate three open‑weight models across eight languages and six games, finding that the same model can show markedly different performance—varying win–loss margins, invalid actions, and strategic choices—depending on the language interface. Analyses pinpoint language‑specific failures in spatial reasoning, card‑conditioned decisions, and optimal move selection, and demonstrate that adjusting the intermediate reasoning language can recover much of the lost performance.
By Bobby Cheng, Adam Gaber, Zhengyuan Liu, Catherine Arnett, Omer Goldman, Cheston Tan, Leshem Choshen
arXiv:2609.01591v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: AI tutors are most useful when they adapt to each student's strengths, weaknesses, and preferred guidance, but evidence about which guidance works for...
By Ke Yang, Chenglong Wang, Michel Galley, Chandan Singh, Jeevana Priya Inala, ChengXiang Zhai, Jianfeng Gao
arXiv:2610.19910v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Large language model agents increasingly improve by distilling experience into reusable skills, but errors in that experience can persist in learned ru...
By Tao Yu, Zhongtian Luo, Yuchen Long, Yiheng Lu, Yuxuan Zhou, Yanpei Gong, Siyi Cao, Yuqing Wu, Haopeng Jin, Zhenghao Zhang, Yujia Yang, Jingmin Zhu, Yunyun Hou, Xinming Wang, Hongzhu Yi, Jiachen Liu, Sirui Wang, Nan Duan, Yan Huang, Liang Wang, Tianjin Huang, Yanyan Zou
arXiv:2608. 20274v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language model (LLM) agents can induce skills from completed tasks and reuse them later to grow more capable with experience.
By Yiyang Feng, Biddut Sarker Bijoy, Niranjan Balasubramanian, Jiawei Zhou
The paper introduces Boundary-Aware Skill Memory (BASM), a method that enriches skill memories for large language model agents with explicit boundary fields such as applicability conditions, risk cues, avoidance rules, and recovery notes. This approach transforms retrieved skills from unconditional templates into state‑conditioned guidance, preventing the Skill Imitation Trap where more skills lead to incorrect tool usage. Experiments on three agent benchmarks and four model scales show that BASM improves task success rates, accuracy, and reduces attack success while cutting average steps compared to memory‑free baselines.
By Zihan Lin, Zhenyu Chen, Jiawen Wei, Xiaohan Wang, Jie Cao, Jiajun Chai, Wei Lin, Guojun Yin, Ran He
Large language models access knowledge inconsistently across languages, but to what extent do they differ in their skill sets when interacting with different languages? This work quantifies cross-ling...
arXiv:2609.23917v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Chess involves complex reasoning in a deterministic environment, which makes it a useful setting for studying the mechanisms of computation inside tr...
By David Litman
arXiv:2607. 00190v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent advances in reinforcement learning have produced superhuman agents across a wide range of competitive games.
By Andrzej Bia{\l}ecki, Adam Mastalerz, Han Zhou