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.
arXiv:2608. 09168v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agent skills are increasingly used to equip large language model (LLM) agents with reusable procedural knowledge.
arXiv:2607. 25675v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Text-space optimization adapts large language models (LLMs) by editing external natural-language artifacts rather than model weights, so the optimized artifacts remain inspectable and the model can be treated as a black box.
Agent skills are increasingly used to equip large language model (LLM) agents with reusable procedural knowledge. Although recent work has substantially improved skill retrieval due to the increasing skill libraries, retrieving a plausible skill bundle does not guarantee that executing it is worthwhile.
arXiv:2609.08944v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agent skills provide a lightweight way to equip frozen language-model agents with domain knowledge and procedural guidance, yet obtaining high-quality...
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.
arXiv:2608. 15071v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Learning from experience is critical for developing capable, self-improving large language model (LLM) agents.
arXiv:2608.28638v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agent skills are portable packages of instructions and resources an agent consults at deployment. Self-evolving them fails in two ways today. First, sk...
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. 01678v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Existing skill generation methods largely rely on heuristics or pipeline-style consolidation, which must be specially designed for different evidence sources.
arXiv:2609.27717v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Human-written agent skills encode rich workflows for real-world problem solving, but are typically used as external inference-time instructions rather...
arXiv:2607. 29468v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Self-play agents can generate training problems without questions from target benchmarks, but their curricula lack persistent state: failures affect gradients yet do not explicitly shape future practice.
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.