BioHarness: Substrate-Aware Evidence Assembly for Biomedical Question Answering across Literature, Knowledge Bases, and Biological Atlases.

BioHarness improves biomedical question answering by raising pooled score from 62.2 to 67.2 across 22,123 QA items spanning seven answer formats using substrate-aware evidence assembly.

• Why it matters: Biomedical QA needs evidence beyond fixed literature retrieval, including gene alias resolution, identifier normalization, and atlas-derived measurements, but existing RAG workflows lack substrate-aware decision mechanisms.
• What they did: BioHarness stages evidence assembly by combining literature retrieval, biomedical entity mapping resources, and access to atlas-derived structured measurements, with ablations and scaling analyses to attribute gains.
• The result: Gains come from repairing evidence-substrate mismatches via reranking, entity grounding, and structured measurement access, and it approaches frontier-level performance on selected literature QA tasks while outperforming frontier harnesses without web access on identifier and locus lookup.