Paper Detail

Learning While Acting: A Skill-Enhanced Test-Time Co-Evolution Framework for Online Lifelong Learning Agents

Bo Mao, Jie Zhou, Yutao Yang, Xin Li, Xian Wei, Qin Chen, Xingjiao Wu, Liang He

arxiv Score 22.3

Published 2026-06-03 · First seen 2026-06-05

Research Track A · General AI

Abstract

Lifelong learning is essential for Large Language Model (LLM) agents operating in dynamic, interactive environments. However, existing lifelong learning agents for long-horizon tasks typically depend on discrete skill or past experiences retrieval with static parameters during inference, which prevents them from continuously internalizing test-time feedback like human learners. To bridge this gap, we propose Skill-enhanced Test-Time Co-Evolution (\texttt{LifeSkill}), a two-stage reinforcement learning framework for Online Lifelong Learning Agents. Specifically, we design Verifier-Guided Skill Learning that addresses the lack of direct supervision for skill extraction by rewarding candidate skills according to the average verifier success of multiple skill-conditioned policy rollouts, encouraging the model to generate skills that are useful for solving tasks rather than merely plausible in text. Furthermore, we introduce Online Skill Internalization, which continuously improves the policy model during test-time interaction by transforming skill-conditioned trajectories into reward signals. This enables the agent to directly internalize reasoning capabilities into its parameters, avoiding the context bloat of experience retrieval. Experiments on LifelongAgentBench show that LifeSkill improves average performance by 7 absolute points by comparing with existing lifelong agent baselines.

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BibTeX

@article{mao2026learning,
  title = {Learning While Acting: A Skill-Enhanced Test-Time Co-Evolution Framework for Online Lifelong Learning Agents},
  author = {Bo Mao and Jie Zhou and Yutao Yang and Xin Li and Xian Wei and Qin Chen and Xingjiao Wu and Liang He},
  year = {2026},
  abstract = {Lifelong learning is essential for Large Language Model (LLM) agents operating in dynamic, interactive environments. However, existing lifelong learning agents for long-horizon tasks typically depend on discrete skill or past experiences retrieval with static parameters during inference, which prevents them from continuously internalizing test-time feedback like human learners. To bridge this gap, we propose Skill-enhanced Test-Time Co-Evolution (\textbackslash{}texttt\{LifeSkill\}), a two-stage reinforcement le},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.04815},
  keywords = {cs.LG, cs.AI},
  eprint = {2606.04815},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
}

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