microsoft-SkillOpt/ckpt/README.md

Paper-aligned SkillOpt reference skills (GPT-5.5)

This folder provides a subset of the paper's main Table 1 GPT-5.5 optimized skills as reference artifacts — one gpt5.5_skill.md per currently included benchmark. You can plug them into scripts/eval_only.py to evaluate the provided skills on a given split without re-running the training loop.

These are checkpoints associated with the paper, not a general-purpose tool. They're here so you can verify the reported numbers and use the skills as portable artifacts. If you want to train your own skill, use scripts/train.py per the top-level README.

This is the first artifact batch. We plan to continue uploading the remaining optimized skills and benchmark split manifests as they are cleaned and verified.

What's here

Benchmark	Skill artifact	Matching config
SearchQA	ckpt/searchqa/gpt5.5_skill.md	configs/searchqa/default.yaml
ALFWorld	ckpt/alfworld/gpt5.5_skill.md	configs/alfworld/default.yaml
DocVQA	ckpt/docvqa/gpt5.5_skill.md	configs/docvqa/default.yaml
LiveMathematicianBench	ckpt/livemath/gpt5.5_skill.md	configs/livemathematicianbench/default.yaml
OfficeQA	ckpt/officeqa/gpt5.5_skill.md	configs/officeqa/default.yaml
SpreadsheetBench	ckpt/spreadsheetbench/gpt5.5_skill.md	configs/spreadsheetbench/default.yaml

Each file is a plain Markdown skill document (~2k–13k chars). It contains a protected SLOW_UPDATE section at the end that holds epoch-wise longitudinal guidance — that's expected, not a formatting issue.

How to evaluate a provided skill

scripts/eval_only.py runs a single skill against a data split without invoking the optimizer. Example for SearchQA against the test split:

python scripts/eval_only.py \
  --config configs/searchqa/default.yaml \
  --skill ckpt/searchqa/gpt5.5_skill.md \
  --split valid_unseen \
  --split_dir data/searchqa_id_split \
  --azure_openai_endpoint https://your-resource.openai.azure.com/ \
  --target_model gpt-5.5

Substitute the benchmark, config, skill path, and --split_dir to evaluate any of the other five. --split valid_unseen is the test split, valid_seen is the selection / validation split, train is the training split, and all runs all three.

On comparing to the paper numbers

To compare against the paper-reported cells, use the same dataset split and scorer. SearchQA's split is checked in at data/searchqa_id_split/ (400 train / 200 selection / 1400 test). For the other benchmarks, point --split_dir at your own materialized split; the loader is deterministic from split_seed (default 42) + split_ratio (default 2:1:7) when split_mode: ratio is used, so a given data_path + seed reproduces across machines. Explicit per-benchmark split manifests are being prepared for upload — see issues #14 and #21.

Why force-accept vs. gated slow-update matters

These ckpt/ skills were produced with the gated slow-update semantics described in paper Section 3.6:

optimizer:
  slow_update_gate_with_selection: true

Current main defaults to false (force-accept mode), a newer post-submission behavior where the slow-update guidance is written into current_skill and best_skill unconditionally at the epoch boundary. If you re-train with the current default, you may produce a different best_skill.md than the one checked in here. Both modes are supported; see the top-level README's "Configuration -> Slow-update acceptance mode" section.