Paper Detail

SimSkill: A Lifelong Learning AI Agent for Autonomous Mastery of Traffic Simulation

Qi Liu, Qinzheng Wang, Yiming Bie

arxiv Score 17.8

Published 2026-09-03 · First seen 2026-09-09

Research Track A · General AI

Abstract

As large language models (LLMs) become increasingly capable, the long-term value of AI systems depends not only on solving individual requests, but also on transforming experience and accumulated knowledge into durable, reusable competence. We introduce SimSkill, a self-evolving agent built around the Simulation of Urban MObility (SUMO) traffic simulator. SimSkill identifies capability gaps, generates and solves environment-grounded tasks, verifies solutions through an action--critic loop, and consolidates experience into episodic, procedural, and semantic memory without updating the backbone model. Through autonomous exploration, it builds a reusable library spanning the traffic-simulation workflow. We evaluate SimSkill on two held-out benchmarks with three backbone LLMs and independent artifact-based verification. SimSkill improves verified completion by up to 25 percentage points, while ablations show complementary contributions from procedural and semantic memory. Its benefits remain backbone- and budget-dependent: memory does not improve every model or uniformly reduce inference cost. More broadly, SimSkill illustrates a design paradigm in which natural language preserves and composes computational capabilities, while executable tools and code provide precise and reproducible execution. All code and experimental data are publicly available at https://github.com/qiliuchn/SimSkill-V1.

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BibTeX

@article{liu2026simskill,
  title = {SimSkill: A Lifelong Learning AI Agent for Autonomous Mastery of Traffic Simulation},
  author = {Qi Liu and Qinzheng Wang and Yiming Bie},
  year = {2026},
  abstract = {As large language models (LLMs) become increasingly capable, the long-term value of AI systems depends not only on solving individual requests, but also on transforming experience and accumulated knowledge into durable, reusable competence. We introduce SimSkill, a self-evolving agent built around the Simulation of Urban MObility (SUMO) traffic simulator. SimSkill identifies capability gaps, generates and solves environment-grounded tasks, verifies solutions through an action--critic loop, and c},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.03753},
  keywords = {cs.AI, cs.MA},
  eprint = {2609.03753},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
}

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