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cs.AI,cs.CL · 2608.07449 · 2026-08-07

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

Mingxuan Zheng,Yujin Zhou,Chuxue Cao,Boqin Yin,Yuyao Zhang,Jiapeng Sun,Shuaishuai Gong,Sirui Han,Yike Guo
TL;DR:把 agent 技能看作可微文本、用"近端文本梯度下降"迭代优化:SkillProx 引入闭式前向更新 + 冻结效用审计 + 单遍校验门控收缩,技能质量提升且不伤泛化。

🎯 问题

LLM agent 通过累积 skills(可复用文本流程)适应重复任务。现有技能精炼方法缺少显式的诊断-结果反馈,且把删除当作普通编辑操作,导致技能在低质量区域反复横跳或退化。

🔬 方法

SkillProx 用近端梯度下降的视角重写技能优化:闭式前向更新(closed-loop forward update)、冻结效用审计 + 候选选择、Prox 单遍校验门控收缩(validation-gated shrinkage),并讨论实现层面的性质与权衡。
章节结构(全文标题提取):
1 Introduction
2 Related Works
3 Preliminaries & Motivation
3.1 Problem Formulation
3.2 Motivation
3.3 Proximal Gradient Descent
4 Method
4.1 Overview
4.2 Closed-Loop Forward Update
4.3 Frozen Utility Audit and Candidate Selection

📊 结果

在多项 benchmark 上技能质量提升,同时保持泛化性;把 deletion 提升为一等公民机制,避免技能退化。

📝 原文摘要

▶ 原文摘要 Abstract
LLM agents increasingly adapt to recurring tasks by accumulating procedural knowledge in skills. These skills are lightweight, reusable textual artifacts that are loaded into the agent's context without weight updates. Recent methods refine skills through iterative task execution, failure diagnosis, and trajectory-guided text-space updates. However, existing frameworks lack explicit diagnosis--outcome feedback and treat deletion as a generic edit operation rather than a dedicated mechanism for consolidating accumulated knowledge. We introduce SkillProx, a proximal-gradient-inspired forward--backward framework that couples closed-loop diagnostic evolution with utility-aware proximal refinement. Motivated by a composite objective balancing task loss and skill complexity, the forward stage re-executes diagnosis-driven edits on the same task batch, rolls back regressions, and feeds measured outcomes into subsequent diagnoses. The backward stage decomposes the resulting skill into auditable knowledge units, estimates their contributions using a frozen leave-one-out utility audit, and applies validation-gated consolidation, demotion, or removal. Experiments on in-distribution and out-of-distribution benchmarks across multiple backbone LLMs show that SkillProx improves average accuracy by 3.0 percentage points over the strongest gradient-based baseline. Component ablations demonstrate the complementary effects of closed-loop diagnosis and proximal refinement.
Deep Read · 2026-08-11高松灯 / Agent 日报
AgentSkillTextual-GDSelf-Evolve