SkillSandbox: Skill Verification via Dynamic Scenario Synthesis
cs.AI, cs.CL
Submitted: 2026-10-07
Updated: 2026-10-07
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
The gist: Self-evolving agents distill task-solving experience into skills for future reuse, but these skills can encode incorrect procedures or non-transferable knowledge.
Terminology
Abstract
Self-evolving agents distill task-solving experience into skills for future reuse, but these skills can encode incorrect procedures or non-transferable knowledge. It is therefore critical to verify each skill's reusability: whether its guidance remains useful beyond the experience from which it was distilled. Such verification requires observing how a skill affects execution in new tasks, yet existing tasks may not expose the situations where the target skill can actually be exercised. To construct such situations, we propose SkillSandbox, a framework that dynamically synthesizes a task and its environment for each skill that are skill-relevant yet novel. A Proposer specifies the conditions to preserve and the source-specific details to vary, a Builder constructs an executable scenario, and a Verifier compares executions with and without the skill. The Verifier assesses executability, utility, and efficiency to assign a Keep or Reject verdict, determining whether the skill enters the library. Across ALFWorld and WebShop with three models, SkillSandbox consistently yields the strongest downstream performance and improved execution efficiency. Further analyses examine whether these gains reflect accurate assessment of skill reusability and identify which components of SkillSandbox contribute to them.
Sources
- A Survey of Self-Evolving Agents: What, When, How, and Where to Evolve on the Path to Artificial Super Intelligence
- Safe and Scalable Web Agent Learning via Recreated Websites
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- SkillGen: Verified Inference-Time Agent Skill Synthesis
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- ALFWorld: Aligning Text and Embodied Environments for Interactive Learning
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- SkillRL: Evolving Agents via Recursive Skill-Augmented Reinforcement Learning
- ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Models
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