🛰️ Daily AI Frontier
‹ back to 2026-08-20

SkillGate: Training In-Policy Skill Selection in Long-Horizon Agents

Research LLM Agents

Ranking

Overall 89
Content 100
Popularity 63

Observed public metrics from 1 member.

Merged summary

TL;DR - SkillGate trains long-horizon agents to select the right procedural skill by separating selection credit from execution credit. This raises a 9B policy’s trial success from 40.8% to 53.2% across five agentic benchmarks while reducing misleading skill exposure.

  • Identifies “selector credit starvation,” where sequence-level rewards give skill-selection tokens vanishing and increasingly wrong-signed credit as trajectories lengthen.
  • Uses disjoint credit channels: outcome rewards train execution tokens, while an action-local advantage trains only skill-naming tokens.
  • Evaluates selection from a 16-skill candidate slate across five benchmarks.
  • Outperforms outcome-reward-only training at the same budget, cuts exposure to misleading candidates by two thirds, and reads fewer skills.

Sources (1)

SkillGate: Training In-Policy Skill Selection in Long-Horizon Agents

arXiv cs.AI Qingyao Li, Wenxiang Jiao, Shuai Shao, Kangning Zhang, Yuan Lu, Yi Guo, Weiwen Liu, Weinan Zhang, Yong Yu 2026-08-19 arXiv:2608.18852
Public signals Hugging Face upvotes 8
Providers: Hugging Face · Upvotes 8 OpenAlex · N/A Publisher · N/A Semantic Scholar · N/A X · N/A Fetched 2026-09-19 14:26:42.607154 UTC

TL;DR - SkillGate trains long-horizon agents to select the right procedural skill by separating selection credit from execution credit. This raises a 9B policy’s trial success from 40.8% to 53.2% across five agentic benchmarks while reducing misleading skill exposure.

  • Identifies “selector credit starvation,” where sequence-level rewards give skill-selection tokens vanishing and increasingly wrong-signed credit as trajectories lengthen.
  • Uses disjoint credit channels: outcome rewards train execution tokens, while an action-local advantage trains only skill-naming tokens.
  • Evaluates selection from a 16-skill candidate slate across five benchmarks.
  • Outperforms outcome-reward-only training at the same budget, cuts exposure to misleading candidates by two thirds, and reads fewer skills.
item →