SkillRL: Evolving Agents via Recursive Skill-Augmented Reinforcement Learning

Abstract:Large Language Model (LLM) agents have shown stunning results in complex tasks, yet they often operate in isolation, failing to learn from past experiences. Existing memory-based methods primarily store raw trajectories, which are often redundant and noise-heavy. This prevents agents from extracting high-level, reusable behavioral patterns that are essential for generalization. In this paper, we propose SkillRL, a framework that bridges the gap between raw experience and policy improvement through automatic skill discovery and recursive evolution. Our approach introduces an experience-based distillation mechanism to build a hierarchical skill library SkillBank, an adaptive retrieval strategy for general and task-specific heuristics, and a recursive evolution mechanism that allows the skill library to co-evolve with the agent's policy during reinforcement learning. These innovations significantly reduce the token footprint while enhancing reasoning utility. Experimental results on ALFWorld, WebShop and seven search-augmented tasks demonstrate that SkillRL achieves state-of-the-art performance, outperforming strong baselines over 15.3% and maintaining robustness as task complexity increases. Code is available at this this https URL.

Machine Learning (cs.LG)

arXiv:2602.08234 [cs.LG]

(or arXiv:2602.08234v2 [cs.LG] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2602.08234 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

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