Nan Chen
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2026
SkillLadder: Multi-User Skill Evolution with Compliance-Oriented Synchronization and Quality-Gated Synthesis
Nan Chen | Yi Wang | Bin Benjamin Zhu | Haoyi Xiong
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Nan Chen | Yi Wang | Bin Benjamin Zhu | Haoyi Xiong
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
LLM agents accumulate valuable procedural knowledge during task execution, but these traces are session-bound, model-specific, and often entangled with sensitive content, making them unsafe to pool directly across users. Prior approaches to skill discovery often sacrifice cross-user generalization, iterative quality, or compliance-oriented sharing. We propose SkillLadder, a multi-user framework that distills local execution traces into a shared skill library without funneling raw data to a central server. The system evolves user-contributed traces into a multi-level hierarchy (L0–L3) using five quality gates that prevent regression below the strongest parent skill under a judge-defined score. To ensure safe sharing, SkillLadder distributes only level-≥1 skills that have undergone entity scrubbing and lineage sanitization. On 𝜏2-bench, where each isolated task execution simulates one contributing user—a deliberately conservative proxy for many small local contributors, not a model of longitudinal human users—evolved skills improve a fixed Claude Sonnet 4.6 agent in three of four domains and generalize to simulated users running different agent models. Compliance audits verify that entity retention reaches zero by L3 and source-attribution accuracy is roughly halved, substantially reducing measured sharing risks.