SkillRL: Evolving Agents via Recursive Skill-Augmented Reinforcement Learning

Peng Xia, Jianwen Chen, Hanyang Wang, JiaqiLiu, Kaide Zeng, Yu Wang, Siwei Han, Yiyang Zhou, Xujiang Zhao, Haifeng Chen, Zeyu Zheng, Cihang Xie, Yao

SkillRL: Evolving Agents via Recursive Skill-Augmented Reinforcement Learning: 75 upvotes on Hugging Face Daily Papers, #5 of 57 papers on 2026-02-11. Day-by-day upvote history.

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 https://github.com/aiming-lab/SkillRL.

Paper page on Hugging Face · arXiv

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