Weaving Multi-Source Evidence for Biomedical Reasoning: The BioMedHop Benchmark and BioWeave Framework
About
Biomedical question answering (QA) increasingly requires reasoning over interacting entities, where supporting evidence is scattered across biomedical knowledge graphs, literature documents, and web-accessible resources. However, existing biomedical QA benchmarks mainly focus on exam-style knowledge, literature comprehension, or short-range multi-hop inference, leaving source-conditioned graph reasoning and evidence topology construction underexplored. To fill this gap, we introduce BioMedHop, a multi-source graph-grounded benchmark for evaluating biomedical reasoning over structured evidence topologies. BioMedHop contains 10,045 instances across KG, document, web, and hybrid evidence settings, covering shared-neighbor matching, intersection reasoning, path-based reasoning, and counting, with option-based, open-ended, and numeric count renderings. To support this benchmark, we further propose BioWeave, a source-aware reasoning framework that retrieves biomedical KG paths, gathers supporting clues from documents and web sources, assembles them into a unified evidence graph, and verifies answers through entity-level evidence support. Comprehensive experiments show that BioWeave achieves the best overall performance among compared methods on BioMedHop, outperforming the strong hybrid baseline ToG-2 by 10.5% in the overall average. Moreover, BioWeave consistently improves different LLM backbones and enables smaller models, such as Qwen3-4B, to achieve reasoning performance comparable to GPT-4-Turbo.
Related benchmarks
| Task | Dataset | Result | Rank | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Entity Pair | BioMedHop | MCQ Accuracy80.4 | 9 | |
| Intersection | BioMedHop | MCQ Accuracy80.2 | 9 | |
| Overall Performance | BioMedHop | Overall Average Score59.8 | 9 | |
| Path Counting | BioMedHop | CountEx45.4 | 9 | |
| Path Reasoning | BioMedHop | MCQ Accuracy73.2 | 9 | |
| Entity Pair Reasoning | BioMedHop | Semantic Answer Correctness67.5 | 7 | |
| Intersection Reasoning | BioMedHop | Semantic Answer Correctness60.5 | 7 | |
| Path Counting | BioMedHop | Semantic Answer Correctness48 | 7 | |
| Path Reasoning | BioMedHop | Semantic Correctness73 | 7 |