Learning What’s Missing: Failure-Driven Skill Discovery via Predicate Bridges

Yanwen Liu, Wendi Ren, Haozhou Gao, Shuang Li

Keywords: Compositional learning, Skill discovery, Curriculum learning, Hierarchical planning

Abstract: Agents deployed in new environments often fail not because they plan incorrectly, but because they lack the skills required to execute their plans. Some tasks can be solved with existing primitives, while others expose missing capabilities that must be acquired on demand. However, current approaches largely sidestep this problem: planners assume a fixed skill library, and skill discovery methods add behaviors without linking them to the cause of failure. We propose Predicate Bridge Discovery (PBD), a framework that treats failure as supervision for learning missing skills. Given an instruction, the agent constructs a predicate program and performs bidirectional reasoning. Forward reasoning estimates which predicates are executable from the current state, while backward reasoning identifies which predicates are required for success. When these sets do not connect, their mismatch reveals a bridge gap—the minimal predicate that blocks execution. PBD learns directly from this gap. It turns the missing predicate into a parameterized skill, and adds it to the library only after it reliably achieves its effect across instances. This yields a compact, executable, and reusable skill set that grows as new failures are encountered. We evaluate PBD on BabyAI and MiniHack, spanning tasks from single-step behaviors to compositional problems that require acquiring new skills. PBD consistently converts failures into targeted skill acquisition and improves generalization to unseen bindings and tasks. These results show how agents can not only act, but identify and learn what they are missing.

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Submission Number: 196