Experience Makes Skillful: Enabling Generalizable Medical Agent Reasoning via Self-Evolving Skill Memory

Hugging Face Daily Papers Papers

Summary

This paper introduces SkeMex, a self-evolving framework that enhances medical agents by distilling interaction trajectories into structured skill memory, enabling better long-term clinical reasoning through context-dependent utility estimation and governance.

Medical agent systems are increasingly expected to support interactive clinical decision making rather than only static question answering. In such settings, effective agents must reuse prior experience across evolving cases, yet existing memory mechanisms often retain raw historical traces that are redundant, noisy, and difficult to govern. More importantly, they rarely distinguish which memories are truly useful for future reasoning. This limits their ability to accumulate compact and reliable experience for long-horizon clinical reasoning. To close this gap, we propose SkeMex, a post-deployment self-evolution framework that improves medical agents through a skill-based memory without updating model weights. SkeMex distills informative interaction trajectories into structured skills that encode reusable procedural knowledge, and organizes them into a multi-branch repository spanning general, task-specific, and action-level experience. To determine which memories should be reused and retained, SkeMex estimates context-dependent utility from environment feedback and uses it to guide value-aware retrieval and repository governance. A closed-loop ``Read--Write--Assess--Govern" lifecycle further supports continual evolution by writing new skills, updating utilities, promoting useful memories, and removing harmful entries. Experiments across diverse clinical tasks show that SkeMex consistently outperforms representative memory-based agents in both offline and online settings. It also generalizes across model backbones and supports transferable skill memory. All data and code will be released publicly.
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Paper page - Experience Makes Skillful: Enabling Generalizable Medical Agent Reasoning via Self-Evolving Skill Memory

Source: https://huggingface.co/papers/2606.09365 Published on Jun 8

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Mangluon Jun 9

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Abstract

SkeMex is a self-evolving framework that enhances medical agents through structured skill memory, improving long-term clinical reasoning by distinguishing useful experiences and governing memory retention based on contextual utility.

Medical agent systemsare increasingly expected to supportinteractive clinical decision makingrather than only static question answering. In such settings, effective agents must reuse prior experience across evolving cases, yet existingmemory mechanismsoften retain raw historical traces that are redundant, noisy, and difficult to govern. More importantly, they rarely distinguish which memories are truly useful for future reasoning. This limits their ability to accumulate compact and reliable experience for long-horizon clinical reasoning. To close this gap, we propose SkeMex, apost-deployment self-evolutionframework that improves medical agents through askill-based memorywithout updating model weights. SkeMex distills informativeinteraction trajectoriesinto structured skills that encode reusableprocedural knowledge, and organizes them into amulti-branch repositoryspanning general, task-specific, and action-level experience. To determine which memories should be reused and retained, SkeMex estimatescontext-dependent utilityfrom environment feedback and uses it to guidevalue-aware retrievalandrepository governance. A closed-loop ``Read--Write--Assess--Govern“ lifecycle further supportscontinual evolutionby writing new skills, updating utilities, promoting useful memories, and removing harmful entries. Experiments across diverse clinical tasks show that SkeMex consistently outperforms representative memory-based agents in bothoffline and online settings. It also generalizes across model backbones and supportstransferable skill memory. All data and code will be released publicly.

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