SkillProx: Self-Evolving Agent Skills via Proximal Textual Gradient Descent

Published
Source
arXiv
Paper number
852
Field
AI / General
arXiv ID
2608.07449

Key points

  • It formulates skill modification as a forward-backward optimization problem. The forward pass verifies diagnosis, revision, and execution, while the backward pass estimates the usefulness of each knowledge unit for integration or removal.
  • It introduces a result-based verification loop that reruns the same task after revision and rolls back if performance drops.
  • In the backward pass, it measures the contribution of each knowledge unit with a leave-one-out scheme, and removing bad knowledge improves accuracy from 46 percent to 54 percent.
  • Across three backbone LLMs, it achieves an average accuracy gain of 3.0 percentage points over the previous best method.
  • Unlike prior methods that only keep adding skills, its key distinction is that it explicitly asks what should be removed.

Paper links

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