Self-Play Meets Skill Evolution: Self-Evolving Search Agents that Pose, Solve, and Remember

Zenghuang Fu, Zhaoyang Li, Qiuyuan Ai, Haoyu Wu, Minghui Wu, Chenxu Zhao, Ante Wang, Guannan He, Changwei Wang

Self-play agents can generate training problems without questions from target benchmarks, but their curricula lack persistent state: failures affect gradients yet do not explicitly shape future practice. External skill memories preserve procedural experience but are typically learned from fixed task distributions. We introduce \textbf{SESA} (Self-Evolving Skill-Augmented Agent), which makes procedural memory an evolving state of tool-augmented search self-play. A challenger poses problems, while a separately parameterized solver alone retrieves skills. Informative failures are distilled into reusable skills and written back to memory. The updated memory changes solver behavior and success, which changes the challenger's reward and the distribution of future problems; the resulting frontier produces new failures that rewrite memory. This bidirectional loop makes task generation and skill memory co-evolve. Because retrieved skills shape on-policy training trajectories, their benefits can enter the model parameters as well as remain in the external bank, enabling memory-free deployment and optional inference-time retrieval. Across seven open-domain and multi-hop question-answering benchmarks, SESA improves average accuracy over SSP by 1.2--3.2 points across multiple backbones and surpasses the skill-augmented SkillRL baseline by 0.9 points under a unified evaluation protocol. On Qwen3 models, SESA-Off retains 1.8--2.2 points of improvement over SSP, while the final skill bank adds a further 0.5--1.0 points. These results show that evolving skill memory is not merely an inference-time plug-in: it changes policy learning and the future training distribution while retaining value as optional external memory. Our code is available at https://github.com/Zenghuang-Fu/SESA-Self-Evolving-Search-Agents.