Library Drift: Diagnosing and Fixing a Silent Failure Mode in Self-Evolving LLM Skill Libraries
Self-evolving skill libraries face a silent failure mode we term \emph{library drift}: unbounded skill accumulation without outcome-driven lifecycle management causes retrieval degradation, false-positive injections, and performance stagnation. Recent evaluation confirms the symptom (LLM-authored skills deliver +0.0pp gain while human-curated ones deliver +16.2pp (SkillsBench)), yet the underlying mechanism has not been isolated. We provide (1) a reproducible trigger: ablations that isolate drift: one disables skill injection (flat floor, +0.002), one imposes premature retirement (active harm, $-$0.019); (2) trace-level diagnostics: an append-only evidence log with per-skill contribution ...
| Authors | Xing Zhang, Yanwei Cui, Guanghui Wang et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 19 May 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 29 July 2026 |
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