Researchers propose APEx, a hierarchical experience utilization framework designed to improve deep research agents that answer complex questions using external tools. The system organizes interaction history into instance-level trajectory memories and category-level procedural skills, coupling them through an Executor, Distiller, and Planner architecture.
- Optimized via a three-stage alternating GRPO training paradigm for reward-guided skill distillation.
- Uses distilled skills as procedural priors for online Planner adaptation through skill-guided test-time reinforcement learning.
- Achieves state-of-the-art performance on 7 benchmarks, surpassing GPT-5.4 by 14.7 points and the strongest memory-augmented baseline by 3.0 points.
APEx enables ground-truth-free self-improvement with skill-alignment regularization to prevent policy drift during testing.