English

SkillFlow: Flow-Driven Recursive Skill Evolution for Agentic Orchestration

Artificial Intelligence 2026-05-15 v1

Abstract

In recent years, a variety of powerful LLM-based agentic systems have been applied to automate complex tasks through task orchestration. However, existing orchestration methods still face key challenges, including strategy collapse under reward maximization, high gradient variance with opaque credit assignment, and unguided skill evolution whose decisions are typically made by directly prompting an LLM to judge rather than derived from principled training signals. To address these challenges, we propose SkillFlow, a flow-based framework that takes a trainable Supervisor as the agent and a structured environment with dynamic skill library and frozen executor, automating task orchestration through multi-turn interaction. SkillFlow employs Tempered Trajectory Balance (TTB), a regression-based flow-matching loss that samples trajectories proportional to reward, preserving diverse orchestration strategies rather than collapsing to a single mode. The same flow objective yields a jointly learned backward policy that provides transparent per-step credit assignment at zero additional inference cost. Building on these flow diagnostics, a recursive skill evolution mechanism determines when to evolve, what skills to create or prune, and where decision gaps lie -- closing the loop from training signal to autonomous capability growth. Experimental results on 14 datasets show that SkillFlow significantly outperforms baselines across question answering, mathematical reasoning, code generation, and real-world interactive decision making tasks. Our code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/SkillFlow-E850.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2605.14089,
  title  = {SkillFlow: Flow-Driven Recursive Skill Evolution for Agentic Orchestration},
  author = {Mingda Zhang and Tiesunlong Shen and Haoran Luo and Wenjin Liu and Zikai Xiao and Erik Cambria and Xiaoying Tang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.14089},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

49 pages, 5 figures, 6 tables