LeafSkill: Efficient Leaf-Level Action Grounding for Recursive LLM Agents

Abstract

Recursive large language model (LLM) agents solve long-horizon tasks through decomposition, execution, and environmental feedback. Yet after producing an atomic subtask, they often invoke the same large model again to translate a familiar instruction into an executable action. We observe that high-level planning is task-specific, whereas leaf-level action grounding recurs across tasks and can be checked against environment-admitted actions. We introduce LeafSkill, an external reuse layer that retrieves semantically related grounding experience, binds action templates to current objects and admissible actions, and uses a lightweight 1.7B selector to choose a bound action or defer the unchanged subtask to the original agent. Skills remain outside the model parameters, allowing a frozen selector to use post-training additions. Under lexical and syntactic paraphrases, exact matching retrieves none of the reference actions, while semantic retrieval preserves 96.0% and 97.0% candidate coverage; the frozen selector adopts 97.34% of unseen skill types. On an independent confirmation set of 200 Robotouille tasks, LeafSkill completes 137 tasks versus 121 for ReCAP (68.5% vs. 60.5%, exact McNemar p=.0259). On the 106 tasks completed by both, it reduces Qwen3.5-27B tokens by 14.42% and calls by 14.08%. A separate held-out repeat yields a consistent 9.0-point success gain and 18.98% token reduction. Reusable leaf grounding can thus improve task completion while reducing host-model inference without replacing high-level planning.