Lifting Traces to Logic: Programmatic Skill Induction with Neuro-Symbolic Learning for Long-Horizon Agentic Tasks

arXiv cs.AI / 5/5/2026

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Key Points

  • The paper addresses a key limitation of foundation-model-driven agents: long-horizon planning is brittle when reasoning relies only on transient, prompt-based traces.
  • It proposes Neuro-Symbolic Skill Induction (NSI), which converts interaction traces into modular programs grounded in explicit logic rather than state-blind parameterized scripts.
  • NSI synthesizes control flow and dynamic variable binding so the agent can learn not just what to do, but when and why to act under changing conditions.
  • The framework is designed to generalize efficiently from few-shot examples and adapt to unseen goals, improving flexibility in long-horizon agentic tasks.
  • Experiments across multiple agentic tasks report consistent outperformance versus state-of-the-art baselines, suggesting a path for agents to evolve logic-based skills.

Abstract

Foundation model-driven agents often struggle with long-horizon planning due to the transient nature of purely prompting-based reasoning. While existing skill induction methods mitigate this by distilling experience into state-blind parameterized scripts, they fail to capture the conditional logic required for robust execution in dynamic environments. In this paper, we propose Neuro-Symbolic Skill Induction (NSI), a framework that lifts interaction traces into modular, \textit{logic-grounded} programs. By synthesizing explicit control flows and dynamic variable binding, NSI empowers agents to discover \textit{when} and \textit{why} to act. This paradigm enables the efficient generalization, allowing agents to induce skills from few-shot examples and flexibly adapt to unseen goals. Experiments on a series of agentic tasks demonstrate that NSI consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, empowering agents to self-evolve into architects of logic-grounded skills.