SkillX: Automatically Constructing Skill Knowledge Bases for Agents

arXiv cs.CL / 4/7/2026

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Key Points

  • SkillX is presented as a fully automated framework that builds reusable, plug-and-play skill knowledge bases to improve LLM agent learning efficiency and generalization.
  • The approach uses a three-level hierarchical skills design (strategic plans, functional skills, atomic skills) distilled from raw trajectories to avoid redundant exploration.
  • SkillX iteratively refines the skill library using execution feedback, continuously improving the quality of learned skills.
  • It also expands skills by generating and validating new exploratory skills beyond the initial seed training data to broaden coverage.
  • Experiments using a GLM-4.6 backbone show that the constructed SkillKB improves task success and execution efficiency, especially when transferred to weaker base agents, and the code is set to be publicly released soon.

Abstract

Learning from experience is critical for building capable large language model (LLM) agents, yet prevailing self-evolving paradigms remain inefficient: agents learn in isolation, repeatedly rediscover similar behaviors from limited experience, resulting in redundant exploration and poor generalization. To address this problem, we propose SkillX, a fully automated framework for constructing a \textbf{plug-and-play skill knowledge base} that can be reused across agents and environments. SkillX operates through a fully automated pipeline built on three synergistic innovations: \textit{(i) Multi-Level Skills Design}, which distills raw trajectories into three-tiered hierarchy of strategic plans, functional skills, and atomic skills; \textit{(ii) Iterative Skills Refinement}, which automatically revises skills based on execution feedback to continuously improve library quality; and \textit{(iii) Exploratory Skills Expansion}, which proactively generates and validates novel skills to expand coverage beyond seed training data. Using a strong backbone agent (GLM-4.6), we automatically build a reusable skill library and evaluate its transferability on challenging long-horizon, user-interactive benchmarks, including AppWorld, BFCL-v3, and \tau^2-Bench. Experiments show that SkillKB consistently improves task success and execution efficiency when plugged into weaker base agents, highlighting the importance of structured, hierarchical experience representations for generalizable agent learning. Our code will be publicly available soon at https://github.com/zjunlp/SkillX.