EASE: Behavior-Adaptive Skill Curation for Self-Evolving Agents
cs.AI
Submitted: 2026-09-29
Updated: 2026-09-29
Code: https://github.com/Eric2i/EASE
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
The gist: Agent skills provide a lightweight mechanism for self-evolving agents to accumulate reusable procedural knowledge without updating model parameters.
Terminology
Abstract
Agent skills provide a lightweight mechanism for self-evolving agents to accumulate reusable procedural knowledge without updating model parameters. However, existing learned skill curators typically optimize curation without explicitly modeling downstream executor behavior. We show that this can cause systematic cross-executor degradation: curators trained with different executors perform best when paired with their own training executor, indicating that effective skill curation is executor-dependent. We formulate behavior-adaptive skill curation and introduce EASE, a framework that learns a single curator that adapts its decisions to different executor behaviors. EASE maintains an online behavioral profile of recent execution patterns and conditions the curator on this profile, the current trajectory, and retrieved skills to add, modify, or remove skills from an evolving repository. We train the shared curator jointly across multiple frozen executors with reinforcement learning, using retrieval-aware and behavior-aware temporal attribution to focus optimization on curation actions with observable downstream influence. Across ALFWorld, ScienceWorld, and WebShop, with executors ranging from Qwen3-8B/32B and GPT-OSS-120B to unseen Kimi K2.6, DeepSeek V4 Flash, and Gemini 3.5 Flash, EASE outperforms strong skill- and memory-based baselines without per-executor finetuning. EASE also maintains 34.5--41.0% fewer skills, improves skill retrieval by 36.3--38.7% and measured edit utility by 51.8--60.0%, and reduces deployment-time inference tokens by 9.1--14.5%. These results establish behavior-adaptive skill curation as an effective principle for building self-evolving agents.
Sources
- EvoSkill: Automated Skill Discovery for Multi-Agent Systems
- Memp: Exploring Agent Procedural Memory
- SkillGen: Verified Inference-Time Agent Skill Synthesis
- Trace2Skill: Distill Trajectory-Local Lessons into Transferable Agent Skills
- gpt-oss-120b & gpt-oss-20b Model Card
- SkillOS: Learning Skill Curation for Self-Evolving Agents
- ReasoningBank: Scaling Agent Self-Evolving with Reasoning Memory
- Qwen3 Technical Report
- Proximal Policy Optimization Algorithms
- DeepSeekMath: Pushing the Limits of Mathematical Reasoning in Open Language Models
- SkillX: Automatically Constructing Skill Knowledge Bases for Agents
- Voyager: An Open-Ended Embodied Agent with Large Language Models
- ScienceWorld: Is your Agent Smarter than a 5th Grader?
- Not All Skills Help: Measuring and Repairing Agent Knowledge
- SkillRL: Evolving Agents via Recursive Skill-Augmented Reinforcement Learning
- CoEvoSkills: Self-Evolving Agent Skills via Co-Evolutionary Verification
- Agentic Context Engineering: Evolving Contexts for Self-Improving Language Models
- Memento-Skills: Let Agents Design Agents
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