CaresAI at BioCreative IX Track 1 -- LLM for Biomedical QA

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Abdel-Salam, Reem, Adewunmi, Mary, Abayomi, Modinat A.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866908511946932224
author Abdel-Salam, Reem
Adewunmi, Mary
Abayomi, Modinat A.
author_facet Abdel-Salam, Reem
Adewunmi, Mary
Abayomi, Modinat A.
contents Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly evident for accurate question answering across various domains. However, rigorous evaluation of their performance on complex question-answering (QA) capabilities is essential before deployment in real-world biomedical and healthcare applications. This paper presents our approach to the MedHopQA track of the BioCreative IX shared task, which focuses on multi-hop biomedical question answering involving diseases, genes, and chemicals. We adopt a supervised fine-tuning strategy leveraging LLaMA 3 8B, enhanced with a curated biomedical question-answer dataset compiled from external sources including BioASQ, MedQuAD, and TREC. Three experimental setups are explored: fine-tuning on combined short and long answers, short answers only, and long answers only. While our models demonstrate strong domain understanding, achieving concept-level accuracy scores of up to 0.8, their Exact Match (EM) scores remain significantly lower, particularly in the test phase. We introduce a two-stage inference pipeline for precise short-answer extraction to mitigate verbosity and improve alignment with evaluation metrics. Despite partial improvements, challenges persist in generating strictly formatted outputs. Our findings highlight the gap between semantic understanding and exact answer evaluation in biomedical LLM applications, motivating further research in output control and post-processing strategies.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_00806
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle CaresAI at BioCreative IX Track 1 -- LLM for Biomedical QA
Abdel-Salam, Reem
Adewunmi, Mary
Abayomi, Modinat A.
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly evident for accurate question answering across various domains. However, rigorous evaluation of their performance on complex question-answering (QA) capabilities is essential before deployment in real-world biomedical and healthcare applications. This paper presents our approach to the MedHopQA track of the BioCreative IX shared task, which focuses on multi-hop biomedical question answering involving diseases, genes, and chemicals. We adopt a supervised fine-tuning strategy leveraging LLaMA 3 8B, enhanced with a curated biomedical question-answer dataset compiled from external sources including BioASQ, MedQuAD, and TREC. Three experimental setups are explored: fine-tuning on combined short and long answers, short answers only, and long answers only. While our models demonstrate strong domain understanding, achieving concept-level accuracy scores of up to 0.8, their Exact Match (EM) scores remain significantly lower, particularly in the test phase. We introduce a two-stage inference pipeline for precise short-answer extraction to mitigate verbosity and improve alignment with evaluation metrics. Despite partial improvements, challenges persist in generating strictly formatted outputs. Our findings highlight the gap between semantic understanding and exact answer evaluation in biomedical LLM applications, motivating further research in output control and post-processing strategies.
title CaresAI at BioCreative IX Track 1 -- LLM for Biomedical QA
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.00806