docs: clarify technical blog structure and SAR

2026-07-14 18:43:56 +00:00
parent 9babe37944
commit a44566aeb8
2 changed files with 251 additions and 239 deletions
@@ -3,29 +3,29 @@
 <head>
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  <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">
-  <title>SkillOpt Ablations and Sleep: When Should an Agent Accept, Gate, or Reflect on Skill Updates?</title>
+  <title>Expanded SkillOpt Ablations, Skill-Aware Reflection, and SkillOpt-Sleep</title>
-  <meta name="description" content="A descriptive analysis of 499 completed SkillOpt run summaries and a controlled SkillOpt-Sleep study of gating, reflection, and consolidation.">
+  <meta name="description" content="Expanded SkillOpt ablations, a skill-aware reflection design with memory consolidation, and a controlled study of the SkillOpt-Sleep plugin.">
  <meta name="author" content="Ziwei Zhou, Ziyang Gong, Yifan Yang">
  <link rel="canonical" href="https://microsoft.github.io/SkillOpt/blog/gating-reflection-safe-updates/">
  <meta property="og:type" content="article">
  <meta property="og:site_name" content="SkillOpt Technical Blog">
-  <meta property="og:title" content="SkillOpt Ablations and Sleep: When Should an Agent Accept, Gate, or Reflect on Skill Updates?">
+  <meta property="og:title" content="Expanded SkillOpt Ablations, Skill-Aware Reflection, and SkillOpt-Sleep">
-  <meta property="og:description" content="A descriptive 499-run analysis and controlled five-night study of skill-update policies, reflection memory, and validation gates.">
+  <meta property="og:description" content="A three-part report on SkillOpt ablations, skill-aware reflection and memory consolidation, and the SkillOpt-Sleep plugin.">
  <meta property="og:url" content="https://microsoft.github.io/SkillOpt/blog/gating-reflection-safe-updates/">
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  <meta property="article:published_time" content="2026-07-14">
  <meta property="article:modified_time" content="2026-07-14">
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-  <meta name="twitter:title" content="SkillOpt Ablations and Sleep">
+  <meta name="twitter:title" content="Expanded SkillOpt Ablations and Reflection">
-  <meta name="twitter:description" content="When should an agent accept, gate, or reflect on skill updates?">
+  <meta name="twitter:description" content="A three-part report on expanded ablations, Skill-Aware Reflection, and SkillOpt-Sleep.">
  <meta name="twitter:image" content="https://microsoft.github.io/SkillOpt/skillopt-assets/teaser-1.png">
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-    "headline": "SkillOpt Ablations and Sleep: When Should an Agent Accept, Gate, or Reflect on Skill Updates?",
+    "headline": "Expanded SkillOpt Ablations, Skill-Aware Reflection, and SkillOpt-Sleep",
-    "description": "A descriptive analysis of 499 completed SkillOpt run summaries and a controlled SkillOpt-Sleep study.",
+    "description": "Expanded SkillOpt ablations, a skill-aware reflection design with memory consolidation, and a controlled study of SkillOpt-Sleep.",
    "datePublished": "2026-07-14",
    "dateModified": "2026-07-14",
    "author": [
@@ -260,10 +260,11 @@
      align-items: center;
      justify-content: space-between;
      gap: 14px;
-      margin-top: 48px;
+      margin-top: 28px;
    }
-    .citation-title h2 {
+    .citation-title h2,
    .citation-title h3 {
      margin: 0;
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@@ -292,7 +293,7 @@
    .takeaways {
      display: grid;
-      grid-template-columns: repeat(2, minmax(0, 1fr));
+      grid-template-columns: repeat(3, minmax(0, 1fr));
      gap: 14px;
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@@ -618,9 +619,8 @@
        <a href="../../docs/guideline.html">Docs</a>
        <a href="#summary">Summary</a>
        <a href="#setup">Setup</a>
-        <a href="#results">Results</a>
+        <a href="#ablations">Ablations</a>
        <a href="#sar">Reflection</a>
        <a href="#stability">Stability</a>
        <a href="#sleep">Sleep</a>
        <a href="#recommendations">Recommendations</a>
      </nav>
@@ -631,27 +631,25 @@
    <article class="article">
      <section class="hero">
        <div class="eyebrow">Technical Blog</div>
-        <h1>SkillOpt Ablations and Sleep: When Should an Agent Accept, Gate, or Reflect on Skill Updates?</h1>
+        <h1>Expanded SkillOpt Ablations, Skill-Aware Reflection, and SkillOpt-Sleep</h1>
        <p class="subtitle">
-          A descriptive analysis of 499 completed run summaries across SearchQA,
+          A three-part report with expanded analysis of SkillOpt's update policies,
-          LiveMathematicianBench, and SpreadsheetBench examines how combined update
+          a skill-aware reflection design for directing updates and consolidating memory,
-          policies trade exploration for stability. A separate five-night
+          and a controlled study of the SkillOpt-Sleep plugin.
          SkillOpt-Sleep experiment studies the same controls using shipped components;
          five nights is the study protocol, not a nightly CLI default.
        </p>
        <div class="meta">
          <span>Ziwei Zhou, Ziyang Gong, and Yifan Yang</span>
          <span><time datetime="2026-07-14">July 14, 2026</time></span>
-          <span>Exploratory SkillOpt ablations + controlled SkillOpt-Sleep study</span>
+          <span>Expanded ablations · Skill-Aware Reflection · SkillOpt-Sleep</span>
        </div>
      </section>
      <section class="content">
        <p class="lead" id="summary">
          SkillOpt improves an agent by iteratively editing a natural-language skill file.
-          That raises a practical control question: when the optimizer proposes a new skill
+          This report extends the earlier project materials in three directions:
-          update, should the system accept it, gate it against validation performance, or
+          deeper ablations of update-policy design, Skill-Aware Reflection (SAR) with
-          ask the model to reflect on its own successes and failures first?
+          memory consolidation, and a deployment-oriented SkillOpt-Sleep plugin.
        </p>
        <p>
@@ -667,24 +665,16 @@
        <div class="takeaways">
          <div class="takeaway">
-            <b><code>Accept Every Edit</code> is competitive in this sweep.</b>
+            <b>Part I · Expanded SkillOpt ablations</b>
-            <span>Its combined candidate and slow-update policy often has a similar or higher exploratory diagnostic than the paper-style baseline, especially for <code>gpt-5.5</code>.</span>
+            <span>Additional analyses surface conclusions that earlier reporting did not: combined update-policy trade-offs, denser test-case feedback, and the distinction between validation-selected and final checkpoints.</span>
          </div>
          <div class="takeaway">
-            <b>Hard gating remains a useful stability control.</b>
+            <b>Part II · Skill-Aware Reflection and consolidation</b>
-            <span>The stress study motivates retaining validation, checkpointing, and rollback around automated skill edits.</span>
+            <span>SAR adds a useful design principle: interpret a trajectory against the current skill before deciding the update direction, then keep durable reflection memory focused through selective routing and consolidation. The design is inspired by EmbodiSkill <a href="#reference-embodiskill">[1]</a>.</span>
          </div>
          <div class="takeaway">
-            <b>Skill memory needs to stay compact.</b>
+            <b>Part III · SkillOpt-Sleep plugin</b>
-            <span>Long, repetitive, or contradictory notes can hurt smaller targets.</span>
+            <span>The preview plugin turns offline experience replay, validation-gated improvement, and staged adoption into a practical overnight workflow for coding agents.</span>
          </div>
          <div class="takeaway">
            <b>Selection and consolidation control memory growth.</b>
            <span>The tested Failure-Only SAR recipe restricts the source of appendix reminders and also uses consolidation, so its result supports the combined compact-memory configuration.</span>
          </div>
          <div class="takeaway">
            <b>The Sleep study combines layered controls.</b>
            <span>Opt-in replay and diverse rollouts have a better measured robustness profile; in one stress case, the validation-gated run remained flat while the ungated run collapsed.</span>
          </div>
        </div>
@@ -718,10 +708,10 @@
        <h2 id="setup">Experimental setup</h2>
        <p>
-          We vary two core mechanisms in SkillOpt. The first is the acceptance gate:
+          The report studies three layers of the system. Part I varies candidate gates,
-          should a candidate skill update be accepted only if it improves validation
+          slow-update policies, and score signals. Part II studies how reflection uses the
-          performance? The second is skill-aware reflection: should trajectories from the
+          current skill to direct an update and how consolidation controls reflection
-          target model be summarized into reusable notes for future skill edits?
+          memory. Part III evaluates SkillOpt-Sleep as a deployment-oriented plugin.
        </p>
        <div class="callout">
@@ -733,9 +723,10 @@
          provider-connection all-zero cells are excluded where noted. The aggregate
          figures support qualitative hypotheses for follow-up; they do not establish
          statistically reliable rankings, especially when differences are small.
-          Implementation semantics were checked against
+          The configuration names, defaults, and code paths described below were checked
-          <a href="https://github.com/microsoft/SkillOpt/tree/a49d0eb1b92ec114b5d22408eaaa18f112c710c8">SkillOpt <code>a49d0eb</code></a>;
+          against <a href="https://github.com/microsoft/SkillOpt/commit/a49d0eb1b92ec114b5d22408eaaa18f112c710c8">SkillOpt commit a49d0eb</a>.
-          provider behavior can change independently of the repository.
+          This code review does not independently reproduce the reported ablation
          results, and provider behavior can change outside the repository.
        </div>
        <h3>Key terms</h3>
@@ -744,18 +735,24 @@
          <li><strong>Hard score:</strong> exact task success, such as answering a question correctly or producing a fully correct spreadsheet output.</li>
          <li><strong>Soft score:</strong> partial credit, useful when a task has meaningful intermediate progress even if the final answer is not fully correct.</li>
          <li><strong>Slow update:</strong> a periodic rewrite or merge step that incorporates broader training evidence into the skill.</li>
-          <li><strong>Skill-aware reflection (SAR):</strong> an EmbodiSkill-inspired routing mechanism that sends skill defects to body edits and execution lapses to protected appendix reminders.</li>
+          <li><strong>Skill-aware reflection (SAR):</strong> a reflection policy that interprets trajectory evidence in light of what the current skill already contains before deciding the direction of an update. This design is inspired by EmbodiSkill <a href="#reference-embodiskill">[1]</a>.</li>
          <li><strong>Consolidation:</strong> a compression step for SAR notes. It removes duplicate or overlapping advice before the skill appendix becomes too long.</li>
        </ul>
-        <table aria-label="SkillOpt ablation settings">
+        <h2 id="ablations">Part I · Expanded SkillOpt ablations</h2>
        <p>
          This section adds analyses that were not developed in the earlier project
          materials: how combined update policies trade exploration for stability, when
          denser test-case feedback is informative, and why validation-selected and
          final checkpoints answer different questions.
        </p>
        <table aria-label="Base SkillOpt update-policy ablation settings">
          <thead>
            <tr>
-              <th>Base setting or SAR add-on</th>
+              <th>Base update policy</th>
              <th>Gate</th>
              <th>Slow-update gate</th>
              <th>Reflection</th>
              <th>Consolidation</th>
              <th>What it tests</th>
            </tr>
          </thead>
@@ -764,58 +761,32 @@
              <td><span class="tag setting-default">Paper-Style Fully Gated Baseline</span></td>
              <td>Hard validation gate</td>
              <td>Validation-selected</td>
              <td>None</td>
              <td>None</td>
              <td>The paper-style stability-first baseline; this is not the current <code>main</code> default.</td>
            </tr>
            <tr>
              <td><span class="tag setting-accept">Accept Every Edit</span></td>
              <td>Disabled</td>
              <td>Unconditional</td>
              <td>None</td>
              <td>None</td>
              <td>The combined behavior when candidate edits and slow updates are both accepted unconditionally.</td>
            </tr>
            <tr>
              <td><span class="tag setting-hard-slow">Hard Gate + Always-On Slow Updates</span></td>
              <td>Hard validation gate</td>
              <td>Unconditional</td>
              <td>None</td>
              <td>None</td>
              <td>Changes only the slow-update policy relative to the paper-style fully gated baseline.</td>
            </tr>
            <tr>
              <td><span class="tag setting-soft-score">Soft-Score Gate + Always-On Slow Updates</span></td>
              <td>Soft score gate</td>
              <td>Unconditional</td>
              <td>None</td>
              <td>None</td>
              <td>Uses partial test-case success as the candidate signal while keeping slow updates unconditional.</td>
            </tr>
            <tr>
              <td><span class="tag setting-hybrid">Hard/Soft Hybrid Gate + Always-On Slow Updates</span></td>
              <td>Mixed hard/soft</td>
              <td>Unconditional</td>
              <td>None</td>
              <td>None</td>
              <td>Combines exact correctness and partial test-case success while keeping slow updates unconditional.</td>
            </tr>
            <tr>
              <td><span class="tag setting-sar-failure">Failure-Only SAR + Consolidation (40)</span></td>
              <td>Base-dependent</td>
              <td>Base-dependent</td>
              <td>Appendix reminders from failed trajectories only</td>
              <td>After 40 notes</td>
              <td>Whether failure-sourced appendix routing plus periodic compression keeps memory useful.</td>
            </tr>
            <tr>
              <td><span class="tag setting-sar-both">Success-and-Failure SAR</span></td>
              <td>Base-dependent</td>
              <td>Base-dependent</td>
              <td>Appendix reminders from successes and failures</td>
              <td>None in the comparison below</td>
              <td>Whether a broader memory of both good and bad trajectories is useful.</td>
            </tr>
          </tbody>
        </table>
@@ -828,18 +799,7 @@
          Edit</code> force-accepts candidates while slow updates remain unconditional.
          The other three settings keep slow updates
          always on while changing the candidate gate to hard, soft-score, or hybrid
-          hard/soft evidence. Tag colors stay consistent throughout the post; a composite
+          hard/soft evidence.
          configuration inherits its base setting's color, while standalone SAR add-ons
          use their own colors. SAR can be added to any base setting. Here,
          <code>Failure-Only SAR</code> is shorthand for sourcing protected appendix
          reminders only from failures; it does not disable the baseline body-edit path.
          For example,
          <code>Accept Every Edit + Failure-Only SAR + Consolidation (40)</code> accepts
          every candidate, draws appendix reminders only from failures, and compresses
          accumulated notes once the appendix grows past 40 notes. Because appendix-source
          selection and consolidation change together in this configuration, its result
          supports the combined compact-memory recipe, not failure-only appendix sourcing
          in isolation.
        </p>
        <p class="note">
@@ -851,52 +811,6 @@
          baseline is stated explicitly.
        </p>
        <h3>Where SAR comes from</h3>
        <p>
          SkillOpt's skill-aware reflection adapts the central idea of
          <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.10332"><em>EmbodiSkill</em> (Ju et al., 2026)</a>:
          interpret a trajectory against the current skill before allowing that
          trajectory to change the skill. A failed run is ambiguous evidence. It may
          expose a missing or incorrect rule, or it may be an execution lapse in which
          the model simply failed to follow valid guidance. Turning both cases into a
          generic whole-skill rewrite can delete useful rules, add redundant advice, and
          amplify noise.
        </p>
        <p>
          EmbodiSkill makes this attribution explicit. It separates a prescriptive skill
          body from an appendix that emphasizes valid rules. When a trajectory provides
          reliable evidence, successful runs are routed to <em>Discovery</em> or
          <em>Optimization</em>; failed runs are
          routed to <em>Skill Defect</em> or <em>Execution Lapse</em>. The first three
          categories can trigger targeted body edits, whereas an execution lapse only
          adds an appendix reminder. Before editing, body-changing reflections are
          consolidated: duplicates are removed, overlapping suggestions are merged,
          target-specific edits are grouped, and unresolved conflicts can be discarded.
          A constrained editor then changes the implicated rules while leaving unrelated
          skill content intact (Ju et al., 2026, Sections 3.1–3.2.2, Equations 2 and
          6–11).
        </p>
        <p>
          SkillOpt transfers this failure-attribution rule to general-domain skill
          optimization. A <em>Skill Defect</em> becomes a normal body edit governed by
          the base setting's acceptance policy, whereas an <em>Execution Lapse</em>
          becomes a short reminder in a protected appendix that step-level edits cannot
          rewrite. <code>Failure-Only
          SAR</code> is closest to EmbodiSkill's original appendix routing.
          <code>Success-and-Failure SAR</code> extends it by allowing successful
          trajectories to re-emphasize existing rules, and the note-count consolidation
          thresholds tested here are a SkillOpt-specific compaction policy rather than a
          parameter reported by EmbodiSkill. EmbodiSkill does not impose a formal length
          penalty or show that shorter skills are always better: the compact-memory
          conclusion below comes from the SkillOpt ablations. In EmbodiSkill's own
          ALFWorld ablation, skill-aware revision raises success from
          <code>78.36%</code> to <code>93.28%</code>, an absolute increase of
          <code>14.92 percentage points</code> (a <code>19.04%</code> relative
          improvement) over skill-unaware evolution.
        </p>
        <p>
          We evaluate on three task families with different reward landscapes.
          SearchQA has a high baseline and limited headroom. LiveMathematicianBench is small and high
@@ -904,7 +818,7 @@
          correctness and more room for partial progress signals.
        </p>
-        <h2 id="results">Result 1: combined update policies trade exploration for stability</h2>
+        <h3 id="results">1.1 Combined update policies trade exploration for stability</h3>
        <p>
          The <code>Paper-Style Fully Gated Baseline</code> is a useful
          stability-first reference, but it is not the highest-scoring policy in every
@@ -1000,7 +914,7 @@
          baseline.
        </p>
-        <h2>Result 2: combined soft and hybrid policies use denser test-case feedback</h2>
+        <h3>1.2 Combined soft and hybrid policies use denser test-case feedback</h3>
        <p>
          An acceptance gate does more than find a promising candidate: it determines
          which edits survive into the final skill. Hard correctness is a useful anchor,
@@ -1074,7 +988,138 @@
          slow-update policy.
        </p>
-        <h2 id="sar">Result 3: selective appendix routing and consolidation keep skill memory compact</h2>
+        <h3 id="stability">1.3 Best-on-val and final expose different failure modes</h3>
        <p>
          The pair <code>bov/fin</code> is more useful than a single score because it
          separates search ability from training stability. <code>bov</code> asks whether
          SkillOpt ever found a good skill according to validation selection.
          <code>fin</code> asks whether the skill left at the end of training is still
          good. Some exploratory summaries above use <code>max(bov, fin)</code> to
          describe observed reachability, but that test-aware maximum can inflate what a
          deployable policy would achieve. The two endpoints must remain separate when
          diagnosing drift, selection on a small validation set, or steady improvement.
        </p>
        <table aria-label="Best-on-val and final diagnostic examples">
          <thead>
            <tr>
              <th>Example</th>
              <th>Benchmark</th>
              <th>Mean bov / fin</th>
              <th>Diagnostic</th>
            </tr>
          </thead>
          <tbody>
            <tr>
              <td><code>gpt-5.4-mini</code>, <code>Accept Every Edit + Success-and-Failure SAR</code></td>
              <td>SearchQA</td>
              <td class="num">70.87% / 56.60%</td>
              <td>Large endpoint gap, consistent with end-of-run drift under broad reflection.</td>
            </tr>
            <tr>
              <td><code>gpt-5.4-nano</code>, <code>Accept Every Edit + Success-and-Failure SAR</code></td>
              <td>SearchQA</td>
              <td class="num">72.04% / 64.62%</td>
              <td>Same pattern at smaller scale: the final skill is worse than the selected checkpoint.</td>
            </tr>
            <tr>
              <td><code>gpt-5.5</code>, <code>Accept Every Edit</code></td>
              <td>SpreadsheetBench</td>
              <td class="num">73.49% / 70.36%</td>
              <td>The endpoint gap is consistent with later ungated updates eroding the final skill.</td>
            </tr>
            <tr>
              <td><code>gpt-5.4-mini</code>, <code>Hard/Soft Hybrid Gate + Always-On Slow Updates</code></td>
              <td>SpreadsheetBench</td>
              <td class="num">64.29% / 66.25%</td>
              <td>Final exceeds best-on-val; the run continued to improve beyond the validation-selected checkpoint.</td>
            </tr>
            <tr>
              <td><code>gpt-5.5</code>, <code>Accept Every Edit + Success-and-Failure SAR</code></td>
              <td>SearchQA</td>
              <td class="num">86.53% / 86.52%</td>
              <td>No measurable endpoint gap in this aggregate cell.</td>
            </tr>
          </tbody>
        </table>
        <p>
          A high oracle maximum shows that one of two retrospectively inspected
          endpoints scored well; it does not tell an operator which checkpoint could
          have been selected without test awareness. A high <code>fin</code> is more
          directly relevant to an automatic training policy. The observed
          <code>bov-fin</code> gaps under <code>Accept Every Edit</code> motivate retaining
          validation checkpointing and rollback. The hybrid policy's final-score pattern
          makes it a candidate for repeated-seed evaluation when the target is smaller or
          the validation signal is noisy, not a universal default.
        </p>
        <h2 id="sar">Part II · Skill-Aware Reflection and Memory Consolidation</h2>
        <h3>Reflection grounded in the current skill</h3>
        <p>
          <strong>Skill-Aware Reflection (SAR)</strong> makes the current skill part of
          the reflection context. When summarizing a trajectory and deciding the
          direction of the next update, the reflector interprets the evidence in light
          of what the skill already contains. This design is inspired by EmbodiSkill
          <a href="#reference-embodiskill">[1]</a>.
        </p>
        <p>
          In the tested SkillOpt implementation, that judgment can route a likely
          <em>Skill Defect</em> toward a targeted skill-body update and an
          <em>Execution Lapse</em> toward a protected appendix reminder. The routing is
          one implementation of the broader SAR principle, not the definition of SAR
          itself. Consolidation is the companion memory-control mechanism: it
          periodically merges duplicate or overlapping reminders to help keep reflection
          memory compact.
        </p>
        <p>
          EmbodiSkill formalizes a related skill-conditioned attribution with
          <em>Discovery</em>, <em>Optimization</em>, <em>Skill Defect</em>, and
          <em>Execution Lapse</em> categories. SkillOpt adapts the failure-attribution
          idea to general-domain skill optimization. In EmbodiSkill's ALFWorld ablation,
          skill-aware revision raises success from <code>78.36%</code> to
          <code>93.28%</code>, an absolute increase of <code>14.92 percentage points</code>
          (a <code>19.04%</code> relative improvement) over skill-unaware evolution. That
          result provides context for the design; it is not part of the 499-run SkillOpt
          sweep reported here.
        </p>
        <table aria-label="Skill-Aware Reflection configurations in this report">
          <thead>
            <tr>
              <th>SAR add-on</th>
              <th>Durable reflection memory</th>
              <th>Consolidation</th>
              <th>Scope</th>
            </tr>
          </thead>
          <tbody>
            <tr>
              <td><span class="tag setting-sar-failure">Failure-Only SAR + Consolidation (40)</span></td>
              <td>Appendix reminders sourced from failed trajectories</td>
              <td>After 40 notes</td>
              <td>An add-on to the base update policy; the normal body-edit path remains active.</td>
            </tr>
            <tr>
              <td><span class="tag setting-sar-both">Success-and-Failure SAR</span></td>
              <td>Successful and failed trajectories can re-emphasize existing rules</td>
              <td>None in the main comparison below</td>
              <td>An add-on to the base update policy; separate cells add consolidation.</td>
            </tr>
          </tbody>
        </table>
        <p class="note">
          SAR can be added to any base setting. In the comparison below, both SAR
          configurations use <code>Accept Every Edit</code>. The failure-only recipe
          changes appendix-source selection and consolidation together, so its result
          supports the combined compact-memory recipe rather than either mechanism in
          isolation.
        </p>
        <h3>2.1 Selective reflection and consolidation keep skill memory compact</h3>
        <p>
          The key question for skill-aware reflection is not simply whether to reflect,
          but how much history should remain in the skill. Broad, unconsolidated
@@ -1145,7 +1190,7 @@
          differences, displayed with a percent sign.
        </p>
-        <h3>A more direct comparison for consolidation</h3>
+        <h3>2.2 Consolidation recovers broad-memory regressions in three matched cells</h3>
        <p>
          The next comparison holds the reflection source fixed at successes and failures
          and adds consolidation after the appendix grows past 20 notes. This more
@@ -1202,7 +1247,7 @@
          sweeps are needed before choosing a threshold by model size.
        </p>
-        <h3>Compact-memory robustness across hyperparameters</h3>
+        <h3>2.3 Compact-memory patterns across hyperparameters</h3>
        <p>
          Averages can hide whether a result is broad or driven by one lucky run. We also
          compare settings against <code>Paper-Style Fully Gated Baseline</code> across four
@@ -1238,80 +1283,15 @@
          </tbody>
        </table>
-        <h2 id="stability">Result 4: best-on-val and final expose different failure modes</h2>
+        <h2 id="sleep">Part III · SkillOpt-Sleep: an overnight optimization plugin</h2>
        <p>
-          The pair <code>bov/fin</code> is more useful than a single score because it
+          Parts I and II study update and reflection policies under a training harness.
-          separates search ability from training stability. <code>bov</code> asks whether
+          SkillOpt-Sleep brings the same discipline to a deployment-oriented workflow:
-          SkillOpt ever found a good skill according to validation selection.
+          if an agent sees new real tasks today, can it improve a skill proposal
-          <code>fin</code> asks whether the skill left at the end of training is still
+          overnight and come back better tomorrow? The preview plugin runs an offline
-          good. Some exploratory summaries above use <code>max(bov, fin)</code> to
+          sleep cycle rather than an in-session edit: it replays recent experience,
-          describe observed reachability, but that test-aware maximum can inflate what a
+          proposes a consolidated skill update, validates it against a held-out gate,
-          deployable policy would achieve. The two endpoints must remain separate when
+          and stages it for review.
          diagnosing drift, selection on a small validation set, or steady improvement.
        </p>
        <table aria-label="Best-on-val and final diagnostic examples">
          <thead>
            <tr>
              <th>Example</th>
              <th>Benchmark</th>
              <th>Mean bov / fin</th>
              <th>Diagnostic</th>
            </tr>
          </thead>
          <tbody>
            <tr>
              <td><code>gpt-5.4-mini</code>, <code>Accept Every Edit + Success-and-Failure SAR</code></td>
              <td>SearchQA</td>
              <td class="num">70.87% / 56.60%</td>
              <td>Large endpoint gap, consistent with end-of-run drift under broad reflection.</td>
            </tr>
            <tr>
              <td><code>gpt-5.4-nano</code>, <code>Accept Every Edit + Success-and-Failure SAR</code></td>
              <td>SearchQA</td>
              <td class="num">72.04% / 64.62%</td>
              <td>Same pattern at smaller scale: the final skill is worse than the selected checkpoint.</td>
            </tr>
            <tr>
              <td><code>gpt-5.5</code>, <code>Accept Every Edit</code></td>
              <td>SpreadsheetBench</td>
              <td class="num">73.49% / 70.36%</td>
              <td>The endpoint gap is consistent with later ungated updates eroding the final skill.</td>
            </tr>
            <tr>
              <td><code>gpt-5.4-mini</code>, <code>Hard/Soft Hybrid Gate + Always-On Slow Updates</code></td>
              <td>SpreadsheetBench</td>
              <td class="num">64.29% / 66.25%</td>
              <td>Final exceeds best-on-val; the run continued to improve beyond the validation-selected checkpoint.</td>
            </tr>
            <tr>
              <td><code>gpt-5.5</code>, <code>Accept Every Edit + Success-and-Failure SAR</code></td>
              <td>SearchQA</td>
              <td class="num">86.53% / 86.52%</td>
              <td>No measurable endpoint gap in this aggregate cell.</td>
            </tr>
          </tbody>
        </table>
        <p>
          A high oracle maximum shows that one of two retrospectively inspected
          endpoints scored well; it does not tell an operator which checkpoint could
          have been selected without test awareness. A high <code>fin</code> is more
          directly relevant to an automatic training policy. The observed
          <code>bov-fin</code> gaps under <code>Accept Every Edit</code> motivate retaining
          validation checkpointing and rollback. The hybrid policy's final-score pattern
          makes it a candidate for repeated-seed evaluation when the target is smaller or
          the validation signal is noisy, not a universal default.
        </p>
        <h2 id="sleep">Result 5: SkillOpt-Sleep applies these controls in an overnight preview</h2>
        <p>
          The ablations above ask which update policy is best under a training harness.
          SkillOpt-Sleep asks the deployment version of the same question: if an agent
          sees new real tasks today, can it improve a skill proposal overnight and
          come back better tomorrow? The plugin runs this as an offline sleep cycle rather
          than an in-session edit: it replays recent experience, proposes a consolidated
          skill update, validates it against a held-out gate, and stages it for review.
          Normal operation does not replace the deployed skill until the user explicitly
          runs <code>adopt</code>; <code>auto_adopt</code> is an opt-in mode.
        </p>
@@ -1374,7 +1354,7 @@
          </tbody>
        </table>
-        <h3>The default validation gate bounded downside in a paired stress case</h3>
+        <h3>3.1 The default validation gate bounded downside in a paired stress case</h3>
        <p>
          In a paired study with <code>gpt-5.4-nano</code> on SearchQA, the ungated run
          adopted a plausible but wrong rule—answer with the document title string
@@ -1419,7 +1399,7 @@
          rollback—and should stage changes for review before adoption.
        </p>
-        <h3>Replay gives the overnight cycle something to learn from</h3>
+        <h3>3.2 Replay and recall give the overnight cycle useful context</h3>
        <p>
          In the study recipe, diverse rollouts and relevant recalled experience are
          associated with larger gains where the target model has headroom. One practical
@@ -1483,7 +1463,7 @@
          All deltas here are percentage points.
        </p>
-        <h3>Diverse dream rollouts improve the study's robustness profile</h3>
+        <h3>3.3 Diverse dream rollouts improve the study's robustness profile</h3>
        <p>
          Sleep only learns useful contrastive lessons if the dream rollouts are
          independent samples. An early engine configuration collapsed the rollouts to a
@@ -1528,7 +1508,7 @@
          </tbody>
        </table>
-        <h3>Sensitivity around the study recipe</h3>
+        <h3>3.4 Sensitivity around the study recipe</h3>
        <p>
          On one gated nano SearchQA cell, every tested change away from the study recipe
          (<code>dream_factor=2</code>, <code>dream_rollouts=5</code>, 10 tasks per night,
@@ -1676,51 +1656,83 @@
        <h2>Conclusion</h2>
        <p>
-          The main observation is that SkillOpt's update controls should be evaluated as
+          <strong>Expanded ablations.</strong> SkillOpt's update controls should be
-          a policy, not inferred from one switch in a confounded comparison. The
+          evaluated as a policy, not inferred from one switch in a confounded comparison.
-          exploratory sweep is consistent with stronger targets tolerating more candidate
+          The exploratory sweep is consistent with stronger targets tolerating more
-          updates, and with test-case pass rates providing useful signal on
+          candidate updates, and with test-case pass rates providing useful signal on
-          SpreadsheetBench. Reflection can help, but the displayed comparisons favor
+          SpreadsheetBench. Validation-selected and final checkpoints must remain
-          keeping its memory compact.
+          separate when judging deployability.
        </p>
        <p>
-          In practice, choose a SkillOpt configuration with the target model, task,
+          <strong>Skill-Aware Reflection.</strong> SAR contributes a useful design
-          validation signal, and deployment boundary in mind. Treat the settings above as
+          principle: reflection should interpret a trajectory against the current skill
-          hypotheses to validate locally, and preserve checkpointing, staged review, and
+          before deciding the direction of an update. The observed cells make SAR a
-          rollback when skill updates can affect a deployed agent.
+          promising direction, while the large regressions observed with broad,
          unconsolidated memory motivate selective routing and consolidation as companion
          controls.
        </p>
        <p>
          <strong>SkillOpt-Sleep.</strong> The preview plugin turns these ideas into an
          offline workflow that replays experience, validates a proposed update, and
          stages it for review. The controlled study motivates further evaluation of
          replay, recall, and diverse rollouts, while shipping defaults remain
          conservative and adoption remains explicit by default.
        </p>
        <p>
          Across all three parts, choose settings with the target model, task, validation
          signal, provider data boundary, and deployment risk in mind. Treat the reported
          settings as hypotheses to validate locally, and preserve checkpointing, staged
          review, and rollback when updates can affect a deployed agent.
        </p>
-        <h2>Method reference</h2>
+        <h2>References</h2>
        <p id="reference-embodiskill">
-          Ju, Ruofei, Xinrui Wang, Xin Ding, Yifan Yang, Hao Wu, Shiqi Jiang, Qianxi
+          <strong>[1]</strong> Ju, Ruofei, Xinrui Wang, Xin Ding, Yifan Yang, Hao Wu, Shiqi Jiang, Qianxi
          Zhang, Hao Wen, Xiangyu Li, Weijun Wang, Kun Li, Yunxin Liu, Haipeng Dai, Wei
          Wang, and Ting Cao. 2026. “EmbodiSkill: Skill-Aware Reflection for
          Self-Evolving Embodied Agents.” <em>arXiv preprint</em> arXiv:2605.10332
          [cs.AI]. <a href="https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2605.10332">https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2605.10332</a>.
        </p>
        <div class="citation-title">
        <h2>Citation</h2>
-          <button class="copy-button" type="button" data-copy-target="citation-bibtex" aria-live="polite">Copy BibTeX</button>
+
        <div class="citation-title">
          <h3>Cite this blog post</h3>
          <button class="copy-button" type="button" data-copy-target="citation-bibtex" aria-live="polite">Copy Blog BibTeX</button>
        </div>
        <p>
-          If you find this ablation useful, please cite it as:
+          If you find this report useful, please cite it as:
        </p>
-        <pre><code id="citation-bibtex">@misc{zhou2026skilloptablations,
+        <pre><code id="citation-bibtex">@misc{zhou2026skillopttechnicalreport,
-  title        = {SkillOpt Ablations and Sleep: When Should an Agent Accept, Gate, or Reflect on Skill Updates?},
+  title        = {Expanded SkillOpt Ablations, Skill-Aware Reflection, and SkillOpt-Sleep},
  author       = {Zhou, Ziwei and Gong, Ziyang and Yang, Yifan},
  year         = {2026},
  url          = {https://microsoft.github.io/SkillOpt/blog/gating-reflection-safe-updates/},
-  note         = {Blog post}
+  note         = {SkillOpt Technical Blog post}
 }</code></pre>
        <div class="citation-title">
          <h3>SkillOpt paper</h3>
          <button class="copy-button" type="button" data-copy-target="citation-skillopt-bibtex" aria-live="polite">Copy SkillOpt BibTeX</button>
        </div>
        <p>
          For the underlying SkillOpt method, please also cite the
          <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.23904">SkillOpt paper</a>:
        </p>
        <pre><code id="citation-skillopt-bibtex">@article{yang2026skillopt,
  title={Skillopt: Executive strategy for self-evolving agent skills},
  author={Yang, Yifan and Gong, Ziyang and Huang, Weiquan and Yang, Qihao and Zhou, Ziwei and Huang, Zisu and Li, Yan and Gao, Xuemei and Dai, Qi and Liu, Bei and others},
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.23904},
  year={2026}
 }</code></pre>
        <hr class="section-divider">
        <div class="footer-note">
          <p>
-            This post summarizes the gating, skill-aware reflection, and consolidation
+            This three-part report presents expanded SkillOpt ablations, Skill-Aware
-            ablations used to choose practical SkillOpt training settings, plus the
+            Reflection with memory consolidation, and a controlled study of the
-            SkillOpt-Sleep results that turn those controls into an overnight plugin.
+            SkillOpt-Sleep plugin.
          </p>
        </div>
      </section>
@@ -136,10 +136,10 @@
      <article class="post-card">
        <div>
          <div class="meta"><time datetime="2026-07-14">July 14, 2026</time> · Ziwei Zhou, Ziyang Gong, and Yifan Yang</div>
-          <h2><a href="gating-reflection-safe-updates/">SkillOpt Ablations and Sleep: When Should an Agent Accept, Gate, or Reflect on Skill Updates?</a></h2>
+          <h2><a href="gating-reflection-safe-updates/">Expanded SkillOpt Ablations, Skill-Aware Reflection, and SkillOpt-Sleep</a></h2>
-          <p class="summary">A descriptive analysis of 499 completed SkillOpt run summaries, plus a controlled five-night SkillOpt-Sleep study, examines the trade-offs between exploration, validation gates, partial-credit signals, and compact reflection memory.</p>
+          <p class="summary">A three-part report with expanded SkillOpt ablations, a skill-aware reflection design with memory consolidation, and a controlled study of the SkillOpt-Sleep plugin.</p>
        </div>
-        <a class="read-link" href="gating-reflection-safe-updates/" aria-label="Read SkillOpt Ablations and Sleep">Read article →</a>
+        <a class="read-link" href="gating-reflection-safe-updates/" aria-label="Read Expanded SkillOpt Ablations, Skill-Aware Reflection, and SkillOpt-Sleep">Read article →</a>
      </article>
    </section>
  </main>