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This paper introduces Skill Self-Play (Skill-SP), a co-evolutionary framework that reconciles the tension between task diversity and verification reliability in LLM training through the use of agent skills. By employing a proposer, solver, and dynamic skill controller within a reinforcement learning loop, Skill-SP enables the generation of challenging tasks while ensuring deep execution and verifiable feedback. Empirical evaluations show that Skill-SP significantly enhances performance on tool-use and reasoning benchmarks, even improving initially misaligned models.
Skill-SP not only pushes the performance ceiling of LLMs but also transforms initially misaligned models into high-performing agents through dynamic skill evolution.
LLM training is shifting from manual design and annotation to interaction-driven self-evolution. However, existing self-evolutionary methods face a fundamental dilemma between task diversity and verification reliability: environment-bound methods obtain precise feedback but confine learning to narrow domains, while open-ended self-generation broadens the task space but lacks reliable verification, allowing misleading rewards to pollute the training loop. We identify agent skills as a powerful middle ground to reconcile this tension: each skill ensures deep, verifiable execution in a specific scenario, while dynamic routing across skills maintains open-ended task variety. Leveraging this insight, we introduce Skill Self-Play (Skill-SP), a co-evolutionary framework comprising a proposer, a solver, and a dynamic skill controller. Orchestrated via a reinforcement learning loop, these components co-evolve in a continuous self-play loop: the proposer generates challenging tasks conditioned on dynamically sampled skills; the solver explores candidate solutions to push its capability boundaries; and the skill controller collects execution feedback to update and expand the skill library. This interactive co-evolution effectively bridges the gap between structured verification and open-ended exploration. Empirical evaluations on tool-use and reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that Skill-SP, serving as a robust evolution engine, consistently pushes the performance ceiling of competent backbones while catalyzing striking turnarounds for initially misaligned models. Our code is available at https://github.com/Qwen-Applications/skill-self-play.
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