Wentao Hu
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2026
SkillBrew: Multi-Objective Curation of Skill Banks for LLM Agents
Wentao Hu | Zhendong Chu | Yiming Zhang | Junda Wu | Ming Jin | Xiangyu Zhao | Yilei Shao | Yanfeng Wang | Qingsong Wen
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Wentao Hu | Zhendong Chu | Yiming Zhang | Junda Wu | Ming Jin | Xiangyu Zhao | Yilei Shao | Yanfeng Wang | Qingsong Wen
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Retrieval-augmented LLM agents increasingly rely on curated skill banks: collections of reusable textual principles that guide decision making on complex tasks. Existing approaches typically expand these banks in an append-only fashion, continuously adding new skills without removing redundant, outdated, or harmful ones, resulting in inefficient and poorly curated repositories. In this paper, we formulate skill bank curation as a constrained multi-objective problem: a desirable bank must be useful for the agent, diverse in its content, and provide good coverage of the query distribution. To this end, we introduce SkillBrew, a multi-objective curation framework that formalizes skill bank curation as Pareto-aware optimization under a utility constraint, and solves it via a bi-level propose-then-verify loop. We evaluate our approach on three public benchmarks. Our findings suggest that treating skill banks as objects of principled curation, rather than ever-growing append-only logs, is an important step toward building self-improving LLM agents. Code is available at https://github.com/Applied-Machine-Learning-Lab/EMNLP26_SkillBrew.