English

PubMed Reasoner: Dynamic Reasoning-based Retrieval for Evidence-Grounded Biomedical Question Answering

Computation and Language 2026-03-31 v1

Abstract

Trustworthy biomedical question answering (QA) systems must not only provide accurate answers but also justify them with current, verifiable evidence. Retrieval-augmented approaches partially address this gap but lack mechanisms to iteratively refine poor queries, whereas self-reflection methods kick in only after full retrieval is completed. In this context, we introduce PubMed Reasoner, a biomedical QA agent composed of three stages: self-critic query refinement evaluates MeSH terms for coverage, alignment, and redundancy to enhance PubMed queries based on partial (metadata) retrieval; reflective retrieval processes articles in batches until sufficient evidence is gathered; and evidence-grounded response generation produces answers with explicit citations. PubMed Reasoner with a GPT-4o backbone achieves 78.32% accuracy on PubMedQA, slightly surpassing human experts, and showing consistent gains on MMLU Clinical Knowledge. Moreover, LLM-as-judge evaluations prefer our responses across: reasoning soundness, evidence grounding, clinical relevance, and trustworthiness. By orchestrating retrieval-first reasoning over authoritative sources, our approach provides practical assistance to clinicians and biomedical researchers while controlling compute and token costs.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2603.27335,
  title  = {PubMed Reasoner: Dynamic Reasoning-based Retrieval for Evidence-Grounded Biomedical Question Answering},
  author = {Yiqing Zhang and Xiaozhong Liu and Fabricio Murai},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.27335},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

20 pages; under review

R2 v1 2026-07-01T11:42:23.527Z