SkillGrad: Optimizing Agent Skills Like Gradient Descent

Hanyu Wang, Yifan Lan, Bochuan Cao, Lu Lin, Jinghui Chen

SkillGrad: Optimizing Agent Skills Like Gradient Descent: 18 upvotes on Hugging Face Daily Papers, #14 of 60 papers on 2026-05-28. Day-by-day upvote history. It lost 10 votes when the Hub removed votes in bulk.

Agent skills provide a lightweight way to adapt LLM agents to specialized domains by storing reusable procedural knowledge in structured files. However, whether downloaded from third parties or self-generated, these skills are often unreliable, incomplete, or outdated. Existing skill-evolution methods often address these deficiencies through heuristic reflections without an explicit optimization formulation. In this paper, we propose SkillGrad, a gradient-descent-inspired framework for optimizing agent skills. SkillGrad treats the skill package as a structured parameter to optimize in a gradient descent fashion: task executions provide trajectory-level loss evidence, automatic diagnoses then provide text-based gradients that indicate the correction directions. To stabilize optimization across iterations, a momentum agent accumulates recurring diagnostic patterns into a persistent memory overlay. Finally, an LLM-based patcher executes the parameter update by applying layer-aware edits to the skill package. Evaluated on SpreadsheetBench Verified and WikiTableQuestions, SkillGrad consistently outperforms training-based skill evolution baselines across two backbone LLMs, improving over the strongest training-based baseline by 6.7 percentage points on average. Ablations further show that momentum and contrastive diagnosis both contribute to the final skill quality.

Paper page on Hugging Face · arXiv

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