SkillWeaver: Web Agents can Self-Improve by Discovering and Honing Skills

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2504.07079v1
• Date: Wed, 09 Apr 2025 17:51:50 GMT
• Title: SkillWeaver: Web Agents can Self-Improve by Discovering and Honing Skills
• Abstract summary: We introduce SkillWeaver, a skill-centric framework enabling web agents to self-improve by autonomously synthesizing reusable skills as APIs.<n>Given a new website, the agent autonomously discovers skills, executes them for practice, and distills practice experiences into robust APIs.<n>Experiments on WebArena and real-world websites demonstrate the efficacy of SkillWeaver, achieving relative success rate improvements of 31.8% and 39.8%, respectively.
• Score: 48.05057798832005
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: To survive and thrive in complex environments, humans have evolved sophisticated self-improvement mechanisms through environment exploration, hierarchical abstraction of experiences into reuseable skills, and collaborative construction of an ever-growing skill repertoire. Despite recent advancements, autonomous web agents still lack crucial self-improvement capabilities, struggling with procedural knowledge abstraction, refining skills, and skill composition. In this work, we introduce SkillWeaver, a skill-centric framework enabling agents to self-improve by autonomously synthesizing reusable skills as APIs. Given a new website, the agent autonomously discovers skills, executes them for practice, and distills practice experiences into robust APIs. Iterative exploration continually expands a library of lightweight, plug-and-play APIs, significantly enhancing the agent's capabilities. Experiments on WebArena and real-world websites demonstrate the efficacy of SkillWeaver, achieving relative success rate improvements of 31.8% and 39.8%, respectively. Additionally, APIs synthesized by strong agents substantially enhance weaker agents through transferable skills, yielding improvements of up to 54.3% on WebArena. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of honing diverse website interactions into APIs, which can be seamlessly shared among various web agents.

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