{"work":{"id":"72b1aff0-91c3-4500-abc9-22129ca67748","openalex_id":"https://openalex.org/W4417248776","doi":"10.48550/arxiv.2504.07079","arxiv_id":"2504.07079","raw_key":null,"title":"SkillWeaver: Web Agents can Self-Improve by Discovering and Honing Skills","authors":null,"authors_text":"Boyuan Zheng, Michael Y. Fatemi, Xiaolong Jin, Zora Zhiruo Wang, Apurva Gandhi, Yueqi Song","year":2025,"venue":"cs.AI","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.","external_url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.07079","cited_by_count":0,"metadata_source":"pith","metadata_fetched_at":"2026-08-05T02:28:24.338817+00:00","pith_arxiv_id":"2504.07079","created_at":"2026-05-10T06:21:27.191054+00:00","updated_at":"2026-08-05T02:28:24.338817+00:00","title_quality_ok":true,"display_title":"SkillWeaver: Web Agents can Self-Improve by Discovering and Honing Skills","render_title":"SkillWeaver: Web Agents can Self-Improve by Discovering and Honing Skills"},"hub":{"state":{"work_id":"72b1aff0-91c3-4500-abc9-22129ca67748","tier":"hub","tier_reason":"10+ Pith inbound or 1,000+ external citations","pith_inbound_count":50,"external_cited_by_count":0,"distinct_field_count":9,"first_pith_cited_at":"2025-09-08T09:43:48+00:00","last_pith_cited_at":"2026-07-09T00:27:13+00:00","author_build_status":"not_needed","summary_status":"needed","contexts_status":"needed","graph_status":"needed","ask_index_status":"not_needed","reader_status":"not_needed","recognition_status":"not_needed","updated_at":"2026-08-21T01:39:44.142409+00:00","tier_text":"hub"},"tier":"hub","role_counts":[{"context_role":"background","n":8}],"polarity_counts":[{"context_polarity":"background","n":8}],"runs":{},"summary":{},"graph":{},"authors":[]}}