Chang Nie, Zhe Liu, Hesheng Wangcs.RO cs.AI cs.CV cs.LG
End-to-end vision-language-action (VLA) and world-action models offer an elegant route to general-purpose robotics, but their reliability is bounded by validated physical coverage. When an unfamiliar object, sensor, embodiment, or contact falls outside that coverage and no validated fallback exists, correcting the failure requires new robot data, a policy update, and regression testing. This recurring burden is the retraining tax. Unlike text, embodied data must often be created by operating machines. We present Teach-and-Grow Learning (TGL), an agent-centered architecture for general robot learning. In its general form, a multimodal agent turns a few successful demonstrations into reusable Skill Blocks: closed-loop behaviors for meaningful subgoals. In a new scene, the agent grounds and composes these blocks, selects learned or geometric tools, observes the physical outcome, and revises the route when execution departs from intent. A Skill Library stores executable behavior, while structured Experience Memory carries forward success, failure, and repair. New tasks are acquired without task-specific policy retraining. Our LIBERO evaluation attains state-of-the-art performance; controlled studies expose skill induction, persistent reuse, and agent-directed adaptation. Finally, we propose the Teach-and-Grow scaling-law hypothesis: if X denotes effective reusable experience, future-task error and teaching demand should approach irreducible floors as power laws in X. The architecture therefore treats deployment as a period of continued learning, in which one task can make the next easier.
Automated red-teaming has produced a growing collection of attack strategies, yet they typically remain scattered across prompts and workflows, making them difficult to systematically integrate, reuse, and improve at scale. We introduce \textsc{JailbreakSkill}, a skill-centric framework for scaling automated red-teaming through reusable and continuously evolving attack capabilities. \textsc{JailbreakSkill} packages existing attack strategies into modular, agent-ready skills that can be directly reused and adaptively selected across tasks and target models. Beyond reuse, it closes the loop between attacking and learning: attack experience is used to diagnose, refine, combine, and discover new skills, which are added back to an ever-growing skill library. This evolution lifts macro-average ASR by 17.5 percentage points on AdvBench and 13.4 points on HarmBench, including a 48.6-point gain against GPT-5.4 on AdvBench, while yielding novel attack strategies such as reframing a direct request as an unfinished document-completion task. Several evolved skills also generalize to unseen prompts and target models without further adaptation. Our code is available at https://github.com/BattleWen/JailbreakSkill.
Tianyi Guan, Yiding Wang, Haotong Yang +5cs.AI cs.CL cs.LG
Modern agent frameworks equip large language models with external skill libraries to solve complex tasks. However, it remains unclear whether these systems can effectively evolve their skills and whether the resulting skills improve task-solving capabilities. To bridge this gap, we introduce ContinualSkillBench, a dynamic evaluation framework for in-context continual skill learning. It covers five representative domains, each containing 100 interconnected subtasks ordered by increasing difficulty and opportunities for cross-task skill reuse. Our experiments show that sequential execution generally improves performance, but the gains vary substantially across models and domains. Moreover, in-context learning performs comparably to explicit skill maintenance on average, suggesting that much of the improvement arises from adaptation to prior context and feedback rather than reusable skill abstraction alone. Explicit skills nevertheless provide selective benefits for tasks requiring reusable procedures or precise outputs. We further find that less capable models tend to accumulate larger, more fragmented collections of task-specific skills. These findings show that current in-context skill evolution mechanisms can support continual adaptation, but still struggle to consistently consolidate experience into robust and transferable skills.
While Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable general instruction-following capabilities, they often fall short of human experts in highly specialized, open-ended domains such as creative screenwriting. Prior approaches typically adopt post-training, yet both supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning require weight access that closed-source frontier models do not offer, and demand heavy compute. Moreover, what is learned is tied to a single checkpoint and cannot be inspected by humans. Recent advancements in agentic continual learning instead attempt to bridge this gap by accumulating external textual skills. However, these methods heavily rely on costly human expert annotations or unreliable LLM-as-a-judge feedback for reflection. To overcome this bottleneck, we propose a novel, unsupervised self-evolving agent framework inspired by the corruption-and-reconstruction paradigm of diffusion models. Instead of relying on explicit external scoring, we leverage existing high-quality human artifacts to construct self-supervised signals. Training then follows the familiar loop of neural network training, forward, loss, and backward, with the loss coming from contrasting the agent's reconstruction against the human original. What is updated is not model weights but an external library of textual skills. We evaluate our framework on the challenging task of short drama screenwriting. Experimental results demonstrate that our method enables the agent to autonomously extract and internalize highly generalizable skills, significantly enhancing its domain-specific generation capabilities. Furthermore, this self-contrastive reflection paradigm offers a scalable pathway for agents to teach themselves the production of complex, high-quality human artifacts, without requiring external supervision.
Daphne Chen, Archit Ritesh Jain, Eric Goossen +4cs.RO cs.AI
While vision-language-action models have demonstrated impressive zero-shot manipulation capabilities, they remain fundamentally black box policies that are difficult to interpret, adapt, or correct when they inevitably fail. In this work, we propose ARCHITECT, a framework that treats robot policy acquisition as an interactive program synthesis task. ARCHITECT leverages the reasoning capabilities of LLM coding agents to synthesize modular robot programs that utilize a suite of perception and control tools. Unlike end-to-end models where distribution shift leads to unpredictable, cascading failures, our modular architecture allows users to isolate failures and localize feedback at the level of abstraction required. We introduce an iterative process where a human supervisor provides natural language corrections to steer the policy. These corrections are grounded in the policy code by program execution traces and distilled into a persistent skill library, a form of long-term in-context learning which enables the agent to accumulate a repertoire of reusable, interpretable behaviors. In a benchmark evaluation on a Franka Panda robot, ARCHITECT outperforms state-of-the-art VLA models and program synthesis baselines on complex, long-horizon tasks, including articulated object manipulation and cloth folding. Our results demonstrate that the synthesized skill library enables the system to transfer to novel tasks with decreasing human intervention, providing a steerable and data-efficient alternative to black-box robot learning. Website: https://robo-architect.github.io/
Enterprise IT support knowledge graphs capture rich relationships among cases, users, devices, symptoms, taxonomic categories, root causes, and historical resolutions. Yet querying them in Gremlin requires knowledge of graph schemas, traversal semantics, edge directionality, and property-graph-specific constraints, making them difficult for non-expert operators to use. We introduce SEGRA, an experience-guided agent for enterprise text-to-Gremlin question answering. SEGRA integrates intent routing, schema- and taxonomy-grounded query generation, multi-shot decomposition, execution-aware verification, and a curriculum-bootstrapped skill library that reuses verified query patterns. On an enterprise IT support benchmark, SEGRA achieves a $7.0\times$ higher mean judge score than backbone-only chain-of-thought prompting. Its skill library further reduces LLM calls by $20\%$ and dollar cost by $18\%$ relative to SEGRA without skills, while preserving answer quality. These results show that schema-grounded agent design and reusable execution experience improve both accuracy and efficiency for enterprise graph QA.
Multimodal agents that think with images iteratively manipulate visual evidence and invoke tools across many steps. Existing reinforcement learning methods reduce trajectories to scalar rewards, forcing the policy to discover reusable tool-use patterns from scratch on every new task; memory-based alternatives retain past experience, yet they rely on test-time retrieval, without updating the policy to absorb reusable patterns from that experience. Our key insight is that multimodal reasoning trajectories should be distilled into reusable skills that co-evolve with the policy during training, rather than being consumed as rewards or retrieved from a static store. To this end, we propose SPyCE (Skill-Policy Co-evolution), a framework that distills trajectories into a hierarchical skill library and updates it throughout reinforcement learning. Execution skills capture local visual operations, while workflow skills encode high-level priors that orchestrate tool use. During training, the policy model conditions on retrieved skills to guide its rollouts, while the skill library evolves using valuable rollouts generated by the policy. This creates a closed loop in which improved policies yield better skills, and the evolving skill library, in turn, provides stronger priors for policy rollouts. Experiments across eight benchmarks demonstrate that SPyCE consistently outperforms both RL-based and memory-based baselines. Further analysis reveals that both the hierarchical skill design and the co-evolution mechanism are critical to our design. These results suggest joint skill-policy optimization as a promising paradigm for building capable multimodal agents.
Autonomous AI agents can execute complex tasks with limited human review, yet they often lack the grounded operational knowledge to make their outputs not just executable but correct, secure, and maintainable. We introduce SkillCenter, to our knowledge the largest open skill library for agents by total count: 216,938 structured skills across 24 domain bundles. A SkillGate-filtered pipeline contributes 114,565 source-grounded skills from peer-reviewed journals, ArXiv, and over 24,000 technical sources, integrated with 102,373 community skills from GitHub and the ClawHub marketplace. We present the end-to-end framework that builds the pipeline subset: multi-source acquisition, an LLM-based quality gate (SkillGate), template-driven generation, iterative source-grounding, and quality-controlled publishing. Source grounding is a traceability guarantee: each retained claim maps to an exact quotation in its source. All skills ship as offline-searchable SQLite FTS5 bundles.
Multi-quadruped coordination has attracted increasing attention due to its enhanced payload capacity, broader contact coverage, and improved adaptability to challenging tasks. Existing methods for multi-quadruped manipulation typically focus on predefined or closed task families, often relying on multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) to train task-specific coordination policies. However, such methods struggle in open-ended continual learning settings, where tasks arrive sequentially and robots are expected to acquire new coordination skills while reusing previously learned ones without catastrophic forgetting. To address this challenge, we propose Conquer, a semantic skill-library framework that formulates continual multi-quadruped coordination as a retrieve-adapt-update process. First, to accommodate varying team sizes across tasks, we design a team-structured Self-Allies-Goal (SAG) backbone that supports variable-cardinality robot teams by explicitly modeling each robot's own state, teammate context, and task goal. For each incoming task, Conquer constructs a task-level semantic descriptor from pre-execution information and retrieves a relevant skill from the library for adaptation. After successful execution, Conquer updates the skill library by extracting trajectory-level semantic descriptors and organizing them according to semantic distance, thereby enabling continual skill accumulation and cross-task knowledge transfer. Simulation experiments show that Conquer achieves a final average success rate of 95.6%, demonstrating strong forward transfer and negligible catastrophic forgetting. Real-world rollouts on Unitree Go2 teams further validate the deployment feasibility of Conquer for practical multi-quadruped coordination. Simulation and real-robot demonstration videos are available at: https://conquer-project.pages.dev/.