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📰 News

• 2026/08 🎉 OpenSkill is accepted by EMNLP 2026!
• 2026/05 🚀 Initial release of OpenSkill.

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Overview

Self-evolving agents need to adapt after deployment — but existing methods assume a usable learning loop is already there: curated skills, successful trajectories, or verifier signals. Real open-world deployments may offer none of these, only a task prompt.

OpenSkill studies open-world self-evolution: an agent must build both its skills and its own verification signals from scratch, drawing on open-world resources but no target-task supervision. Target-task supervision is reserved strictly for final evaluation.

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The Idea — a new paradigm for self-evolving skills

Unlike human-curated, LLM-generated, or supervised self-evolution, OpenSkill acquires skills from the open world and verifies them with self-built virtual tasks — making it simultaneously scalable, grounded, and supervision-free. Prior paradigms each miss at least one of these properties.

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How OpenSkill works

Given only a task prompt, a base model, tool access, and open-world resources, OpenSkill bootstraps a learning loop from scratch in three stages.

Stage	Name	What happens
01	Open-world knowledge acquisition	Retrieves task-relevant knowledge and independent verification anchors from docs, repos, papers, and the web — then drafts a structured skill plan.
02	Leakage-free skill evolution	Drafts skills and refines them in a sandbox against self-built virtual tests grounded in the anchors, fixing bugs and knowledge gaps over up to three rounds.
03	Zero-shot target evaluation	Deploys the frozen skill to the target agent. Ground-truth tests are unlocked only here, at final evaluation — never during construction.

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🚀 Getting Started

Requirements

• Python 3.12+ and uv
• Docker (each task runs in its own container)
• API keys: Anthropic (skill creation & evaluation), Gemini (deep research & search grounding), optionally OpenAI (Codex evaluation)

Installation

git clone https://github.com/OpenLAIR/OpenSkill.git
cd OpenSkill
uv sync --locked          # pinned dependency tree, including the Harbor sandbox framework
cp .env.example .env      # then fill in your API keys

All dependency versions (including the Harbor evaluation framework and the google-genai SDK) are pinned in uv.lock to the exact versions the release was validated with.

Repository layout

OpenSkill/
├── libs/
│   ├── openskill/               # the OpenSkill pipeline
│   │   ├── pipeline.py          #   Stage 1–3 orchestrator 
│   │   ├── run_pipeline.py      #   CLI: evolve skills from scratch
│   │   ├── run_eval.py          #   CLI: zero-shot evaluation of existing skills
│   │   ├── openskill_evolution.py #  in-container skill-creator agent 
│   │   ├── agent_planner.py     #   research-query synthesis        
│   │   ├── skill_planner.py     #   multi-skill plan + references   
│   │   ├── deep_research_client.py # deep-research retrieval        
│   │   └── targeted_dr.py       #   gap-vs-bug diagnosis & retrieval 
│   └── terminus_agent/          # agent runtime: skill discovery, virtual verifier,
│                                #   pytest parsing, evaluation-agent wrappers
├── .claude/skills/skill-creator/ # meta-skill injected into the creator agent
├── tasks/                       # 84 SkillsBench tasks — no skills
├── tasks-evolved/               # the same tasks + skills evolved by OpenSkill + retrieved docs
└── pyproject.toml / uv.lock / LICENSE / .env.example

Two copies of the benchmark ship with the repo:

• tasks/ — clean task definitions (instruction, environment, hidden tests). The input for evolving skills from scratch.
• tasks-evolved/ — identical tasks with the released evolved skills (environment/skills/evo-*) and the retrieved knowledge documents (environment/doc/) used in the paper. The input for reproducing the main results.

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📊 Reproducing the main results

Evaluate the released skills with a fresh target agent (Claude Code + Opus 4.6, the paper's main setting). Ground-truth tests run only in this stage:

uv run python -m libs.openskill.run_eval \
    --tasks 3d-scan-calc \
    --tasks-dir tasks-evolved \
    --eval-agent claude-code \
    --model anthropic/claude-opus-4-6 \
    --eval-runs 5

• --eval-runs 5 follows the paper protocol (n_eval = 5 independent zero-shot runs per task).
• --eval-agent selects the target harness: claude-code or codex.
• To sweep the whole benchmark, pass --tasks $(ls tasks-evolved).
• On machines with slow disks, add --timeout-multiplier 4 to scale the per-task Docker build and agent timeouts.

Results are appended to results/eval_results.csv (per-task reward and test-level accuracy).

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🧬 Evolving skills from scratch

Run the full three-stage pipeline on a clean task — deep research, skill planning, verification-anchor retrieval, sandboxed evolution against the virtual verifier, then a 5-run evaluation of the newly evolved skills:

uv run python -m libs.openskill.run_pipeline \
    --tasks 3d-scan-calc \
    --eval-runs 5

The pipeline copies the task from tasks/ into an isolated workspace/, strips any pre-existing skills or documents, and never exposes the hidden test suite to the creator or the verifier. Evolved skills land in workspace/<task>/environment/skills/evo-*; the full evolution trace (interventions, virtual-test results, verifier sessions) is stored under jobs/<job-name>/.

[!NOTE] Skill evolution is stochastic. On tasks whose instructions under-specify conventions (units, interface variants, event definitions), a single evolution run can converge to a convention that differs from the hidden tests, so per-task rewards vary across runs. The skills in tasks-evolved/ are the validated versions used for the paper's numbers; use them for exact reproduction, and expect run-to-run variance when re-evolving from scratch.

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Results — best automated pass rate on every setting

On SkillsBench (11 domains) OpenSkill beats the strongest closed-world baseline by +8.9 / +8.8 points and lands within 1–3 points of the human upper bound — while honoring the no-supervision constraint.

SkillsBench — overall average pass rate (%)  (Human = reference upper bound, excluded from ranking)

Target agent	No Skill	Self-Gen	CoT	Skill-Creator	AutoSkill	Memento	OpenSkill	Human
Opus 4.6 (Claude Code)	25.5	23.9	23.9	34.7	24.7	30.1	43.6	44.5
GPT 5.2 (Codex)	25.0	32.2	33.3	29.2	11.2	15.6	42.1	44.8

Beyond SkillsBench, OpenSkill is also the best automated method on SocialMaze (82.7% / 70.7%) and ScienceWorld (90.0% / 85.3%) across both target agents.

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Analysis — skills transfer, the verifier aligns, every component matters  _{(click to expand)}

RQ1 — Transferability Skills generated by Opus 4.6 transfer as-is to four weaker models, improving by +5.5 to +14.8 points over no-skill with no model-specific adaptation.

RQ2 — Virtual verifier quality Without ever seeing ground-truth tests, the verifier reaches 80.5% recall against GT-positive outcomes, 60.7% overall agreement, and covers 88.9% of GT test intents.

RQ3 — Component contribution. On SocialMaze, reward peaks at three refinement rounds; open-world query and the virtual verifier each improve over a parametric-only baseline and are largely complementary.

 

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🗺️ Roadmap

🟢 Released

• Project page & overview — openlair.github.io/openskill
• Paper preprint (arXiv) — arXiv:2606.06741
• Core OpenSkill framework code (knowledge acquisition → skill evolution → evaluation)
• Reproduction scripts for the SkillsBench main results
• Evolved skills and retrieved knowledge documents for all 84 SkillsBench tasks (tasks-evolved/)

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Citation

@misc{yan2026openskillopenworldselfevolutionllm,
  title         = {OpenSkill: Open-World Self-Evolution for LLM Agents},
  author        = {Zhiling Yan and Dingjie Song and Hanrong Zhang and Wei Liang and Yuxuan Zhang and Yutong Dai and Lifang He and Philip S. Yu and Ran Xu and Xiang Li and Lichao Sun},
  year          = {2026},
  eprint        = {2606.06741},
  archivePrefix = {arXiv},
  primaryClass  = {cs.AI},
  url           = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.06741}
}

Authors & Affiliations  _{(click to expand)}

Zhiling Yan^1,*, Dingjie Song^1,*, Hanrong Zhang², Wei Liang¹, Yuxuan Zhang^3,4, Yutong Dai⁵, Lifang He¹, Philip S. Yu², Ran Xu⁵, Xiang Li⁶, Lichao Sun^1,†

¹ Lehigh University  ·  ² University of Illinois Chicago  ·  ³ University of British Columbia  ·  ⁴ Vector Institute  ·  ⁵ Salesforce AI Research  ·  ⁶ Massachusetts General Hospital & Harvard Medical School

_{* Equal contribution    † Corresponding author}

              

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