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This arXiv preprint proposes a method in which an LLM agent optimizes its own reusable "skills" and also rewrites the procedure it uses to optimize them. The reported result is a 60.7% pass rate on 83 SkillsBench tasks, versus 56.4% for human-curated skills and 54.5% for the prior SkillEvolver method. The gains are modest, come from a single benchmark, and are not yet independently replicated, so readers should treat the recursive framing as a research direction rather than a demonstrated capability. Still, the decoupled, reusable meta-skill approach is worth watching for agent-engineering practice.
Source coveringarXiv

Skill$^{\infty}$: Recursive Self-Improvement for Agent Skill Optimization

arXiv2 min read

arXiv:2610.35434v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recursive self-improvement (RSI), in which a system also improves the way it improves, is a long-standing aspiration on the path to AGI. Language agents increasingly store procedural knowledge in reusable skills. Optimizing skills offers a direct way to achieve RSI, because the optimization procedure itself can be encoded as a skill. Existing skill optimizers, however, follow a hand-designed procedure. Even methods that evolve a meta-skill confine it to a fixed pipeline and relearn it for each task. We present Skill$^{\infty}$, which makes skill optimization recursively self-improving: a meta agent follows a meta-skill to optimize task skills and optimizes the meta-skill itself using the same procedure. The optimization is agent-led. The meta agent diagnoses execution traces, proposes candidates, requests independent reviews, and allocates the search budget. The meta-skill defines these steps, allowing self-improvement to rewrite them. This meta-skill is also decoupled from task skills, refined on multiple skill optimization tasks and then reused to optimize task skills across diverse domains. As in deployment, skills at both levels are standard packages loaded through native skill discovery. On 83 SkillsBench tasks, Skill$^{\infty}$ reaches a pass rate of 60.7%, compared with 56.4% for human-curated skills and 54.5% for SkillEvolver.

Abstract:Recursive self-improvement (RSI), in which a system also improves the way it improves, is a long-standing aspiration on the path to AGI. Language agents increasingly store procedural knowledge in reusable skills. Optimizing skills offers a direct way to achieve RSI, because the optimization procedure itself can be encoded as a skill. Existing skill optimizers, however, follow a hand-designed procedure. Even methods that evolve a meta-skill confine it to a fixed pipeline and relearn it for each task. We present Skill$^{\infty}$, which makes skill optimization recursively self-improving: a meta agent follows a meta-skill to optimize task skills and optimizes the meta-skill itself using the same procedure. The optimization is agent-led. The meta agent diagnoses execution traces, proposes candidates, requests independent reviews, and allocates the search budget. The meta-skill defines these steps, allowing self-improvement to rewrite them. This meta-skill is also decoupled from task skills, refined on multiple skill optimization tasks and then reused to optimize task skills across diverse domains. As in deployment, skills at both levels are standard packages loaded through native skill discovery. On 83 SkillsBench tasks, Skill$^{\infty}$ reaches a pass rate of 60.7%, compared with 56.4% for human-curated skills and 54.5% for SkillEvolver.

Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Computation and Language (cs.CL)

arXiv:2610.35434 [cs.AI]

(or arXiv:2610.35434v1 [cs.AI] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2610.35434 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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Full text under the publisher's open licence · 293 words