Reflective Prompt Optimization of a Deep-Research Agent: A Topic-Disjoint, Multi-Seed Protocol for Measuring Transferable Gains and Prompt-Level Overfitting

Elias Lumer, Sahil Sen, Vamse Kumar Subbiah, Kevin Paul

Prompt optimization is an attractive alternative to reinforcement learning for adapting language-model agents, since it is cheap and produces human-readable artifacts. On factual tasks, however, it carries a failure mode that scalar-reward reinforcement learning does not. An optimizer that reads the training examples can write their answers into the prompt, so an in-distribution gain may be memorization rather than transferable behaviour. We apply reflective prompt evolution (GEPA) to the two system prompts of a multi-agent deep-research agent and evaluate it under a topic-disjoint split in which no topic is shared across train, validation, and test. Held-out citation reward rises by 0.079, from 0.702 to 0.781, with a bootstrap 95\% confidence interval of [0.051, 0.107], and the gain replicates across three seeds (mean 0.107). Nearly half of the winning prompt is a memorized answer key, yet a controlled ablation shows this content earns no reward even on the exact training questions it encodes. The large validation-minus-held-out gap is therefore small-sample selection under a noisy judge, not memorization. Varying the verifier isolates what makes the gain transfer. Decomposed…