Agents & RL Feb 2026 · #32 most cited · 150 citations

SkillRL: Evolving Agents via Recursive Skill-Augmented Reinforcement Learning

Peng Xia et al.

arXiv:2602.08234

In short

SkillRL distils an agent’s past trajectories into a hierarchical library of reusable skills, retrieves the relevant ones for each task, and keeps evolving the library alongside the policy during reinforcement learning. It beats strong baselines on household, shopping and search tasks while using fewer tokens.

Why it matters

It connects two hot ideas, agent skills and agentic RL, into one learning loop.

Read first

The 3 Field Guide ideas this paper leans on.

Starting from scratch? The full route 24 ideas · basics first
  1. Machine Learning ✓ understood

    Building systems that learn patterns from data instead of following hand-written rules, getting better at a task as they see more examples.

  2. Reinforcement Learning · read first ✓ understood

    Learning through interaction with an environment, receiving rewards or penalties to learn optimal behavior policies.

  3. Agent ✓ understood

    In RL, the learner or decision-maker that takes actions in an environment to maximize cumulative reward.

  4. Policy · read first ✓ understood

    A strategy or mapping from states to actions that defines the agent's behavior in reinforcement learning.

  5. Natural Language Processing ✓ understood

    The field of AI that lets computers read, interpret, translate and generate human language, from spam filters and search to chatbots.

  6. Token ✓ understood

    The basic unit of text that a language model processes, typically representing a word, subword, or character. Tokens are the fundamental building blocks for LLM input and output.

  7. Tokenization ✓ understood

    Splitting text into tokens, usually subword pieces, and mapping each to an integer ID so a language model can process it.

  8. Language Modeling ✓ understood

    Learning probability distributions over sequences of words to predict what comes next.

  9. Dataset ✓ understood

    A collection of data examples used for training, validating, or testing machine learning models.

  10. Training ✓ understood

    The process of fitting a model to data by repeatedly measuring how wrong its outputs are and adjusting its parameters to reduce that error.

  11. Unsupervised Learning ✓ understood

    Learning from unlabeled data to discover hidden patterns, structures, or relationships without explicit target outputs.

  12. Self-Supervised Learning ✓ understood

    Learning representations from unlabeled data by creating supervised tasks from the data itself (masked prediction, contrastive learning).

  13. Pre-training ✓ understood

    Training a model on a large dataset (often self-supervised) before fine-tuning on specific tasks, enabling transfer learning.

  14. Feature ✓ understood

    A single measurable property of an example, such as a house's floor area or how many links an email contains, used as an input to a model.

  15. Neural Network ✓ understood

    A computational model inspired by biological neural networks, consisting of interconnected nodes (neurons) organized in layers that process information through weighted connections.

  16. Deep Learning ✓ understood

    A subset of machine learning that uses neural networks with multiple layers (deep neural networks) to learn hierarchical representations of data.

  17. Representation Learning ✓ understood

    Learning useful features or representations of data automatically, rather than hand-crafting them.

  18. Embedding ✓ understood

    A list of numbers (a vector) that represents a word, sentence, image or other item, learned so that similar items end up close together.

  19. Attention Mechanism ✓ understood

    A technique that lets a neural network weigh every part of its input when producing each output, focusing on the parts most relevant at that step.

  20. Transformer ✓ understood

    A neural network architecture, introduced in 2017, built from stacked self-attention and feed-forward layers; the basis of nearly every modern large language model.

  21. Large Language Model ✓ understood

    A neural network, almost always a transformer, trained on vast amounts of text to predict the next token, which lets it write, answer, summarize and follow instructions.

  22. Context Window ✓ understood

    The maximum number of tokens an LLM can process at once, including both input prompt and generated output. Also called context length.

  23. Tool Use ✓ understood

    LLMs learning to call external tools, APIs, or functions to extend capabilities beyond text generation (calculators, search, code execution).

  24. AI Agent · read first ✓ understood

    A system where a large language model decides its own next steps in a loop: calling tools, reading the results, and continuing until the task is done.

In the frontier

Rank
#32 of 100
Citations
150
as of Aug 9, 2026
Published
Feb 2026

Topics: Agent training and self-evolution , Agent skills and memory , RL for reasoning

Selection: 1kpapers.com by Together AI, most-cited as of Aug 9, 2026

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