Papers for

llm system developers

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

Synthetic data can cause forgetting in large skill retrieval systems

When Synthetic Data Hurts: On Catastrophic Forgetting in Skill Retrieval for LLM Agents

Abstract: LLM agents increasingly rely on external skills retrieved at runtime, making skill selection from large repositories a critical challenge. We present a production skill router over 34,396 skills and a large-scale study of skill retrieval using limited real supervision and synthetic data. We found that the synthetic-data fine-tuning improves in-distribution retrieval but it causes catastrophic forgetting on real and out-of-distribution (OOD) data. We evaluate several forgetting mitigation fine-tuning approaches inspired by continual learning, including embedding-anchor regularization, Learning without Forgetting (LwF), Elastic Weight Consolidation (EWC), and L2-initialization. The results show that these approaches not only retain the performance on OOD skills retrieval but also improve the retrieval on synthetic in-distribution skills by 13.98\% for 0.6B Qwen retriever and reranker. Our results provide a practical benchmark and a robust fine-tuning recipe for scarce, multi-positive supervision.

Wed 9 SeptInformation RetrievalArtificial IntelligenceMachine Learning
The gist
Selecting the right skills from a huge list is important for AI helpers that use language models. The authors show that training with made-up (synthetic) data helps the AI pick good skills it has seen before but makes it forget how to pick real or new skills. They tested several methods meant to stop this forgetting and found some improved performance across both familiar and new skill choices. This work gives a tested way to train these AI helpers better when there isn’t much real data available.
Open 2609.10750v1

Self evolving skill graphs improve large language model task retrieval

SE-GoS: Self-Evolving Graph-of-Skills for Skill Library at Scale

Abstract: Modern LLM agents increasingly rely on reusable skills, yet as skill libraries scale to thousands of entries, effective retrieval becomes a bottleneck. Graph-of-Skills (GoS) addresses this challenge by exploiting dependency-aware graph structure for scalable skill retrieval, while SkillDAG further demonstrates that skill graphs can accumulate execution-backed structure online. However, these approaches leave open whether historical execution traces can be systematically distilled into a better retrieval graph that generalizes to unseen tasks. We present Self-Evolving Graph-of-Skills (SE-GoS), a training-free framework that evolves an existing GoS graph from execution traces while preserving the original retrieval pipeline. SE-GoS performs three complementary updates: topology evolution that discovers and prunes skill relationships from execution evidence, edge-weight evolution that reinforces retrieval-relevant relationships based on historical effectiveness, and description evolution that optimizes retrieval-facing skill descriptions using execution feedback. Across three LLMs on SkillsBench, SE-GoS consistently improves task reward while reducing input tokens relative to full skill loading, with gains varying across model families. In a representative setting, one evolution round improves reward from 52.4\% to 59.4\% while reducing input tokens by approximately one-third relative to full skill loading, and the resulting graph transfers to a disjoint held-out split with a 5.4-point improvement over the static GoS baseline. These results show that skill graphs can be improved from execution experience without model training, changes to the retrieval algorithm, or modifications to skill content, turning a static retrieval graph into an evolving retrieval infrastructure.

Tue 8 SeptArtificial IntelligenceComputation and Language
The gist
Large language models (LLMs) use many small specialized abilities called skills to complete tasks. When there are thousands of these skills, finding the right ones quickly becomes hard. The authors propose SE-GoS, a method that improves how these skills are organized by learning from past tasks without retraining the model. This makes the skill search smarter and faster, improving performance and reducing the amount of information needed to pick skills. Their method works across different LLMs and even helps for tasks the system hasn’t seen before.
Open 2609.08228v1