SkillOS: Learning Skill Curation for Self-Evolving Agents
Siru Ouyang, Jun Yan, Yanfei Chen, Rujun Han, Zifeng Wang + 11 more
TLDR
SkillOS enables LLM agents to self-evolve by learning to curate reusable skills from experience, outperforming baselines in various tasks.
Key contributions
- Introduces SkillOS, an RL recipe for agents to learn skill curation from accumulated experience.
- Pairs a frozen agent executor with a trainable skill curator that updates an external SkillRepo.
- Utilizes composite rewards and grouped task streams to provide effective learning signals for curation.
- Outperforms strong memory-based baselines across multi-turn and single-turn tasks, generalizing across domains.
Why it matters
LLM agents typically don't learn from past interactions, limiting their long-term utility. SkillOS tackles this by enabling agents to autonomously learn and curate reusable skills, fostering self-evolution. This significantly improves agent performance and efficiency, paving the way for more adaptive and intelligent AI systems.
Original Abstract
LLM-based agents are increasingly deployed to handle streaming tasks, yet they often remain one-off problem solvers that fail to learn from past interactions. Reusable skills distilled from experience provide a natural substrate for self-evolution, where high-quality skill curation serves as the key bottleneck. Existing approaches either rely on manual skill curation, prescribe heuristic skill operations, or train for short-horizon skill operations. However, they still struggle to learn complex long-term curation policies from indirect and delayed feedback. To tackle this challenge, we propose SkillOS, an experience-driven RL training recipe for learning skill curation in self-evolving agents. SkillOS pairs a frozen agent executor that retrieves and applies skills with a trainable skill curator that updates an external SkillRepo from accumulated experience. To provide learning signals for curation, we design composite rewards and train on grouped task streams based on skill-relevant task dependencies, where earlier trajectories update the SkillRepo, and later related tasks evaluate these updates. Across multi-turn agentic tasks and single-turn reasoning tasks, SkillOS consistently outperforms memory-free and strong memory-based baselines in both effectiveness and efficiency, with the learned skill curator generalizing across different executor backbones and task domains. Further analyses show that the learned curator produces more targeted skill use, while the skills in SkillRepo evolve into more richly structured Markdown files that encode higher-level meta-skills over time.
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