Generating Biomedical Fact-Checking Reports with RL-Enhanced Agentic Search

Researchers introduced BioCheck Agent, an LLM-based agent that generates structured biomedical fact-checking reports using agentic search of PubMed literature, and proposed Evidence-Grounded Group Relative Policy Optimization (EG-GRPO) to train it. Compared to the base model Qwen3.5-4B, BioCheck Agent with EG-GRPO improved label prediction accuracy on SciFact by 9.95%, achieved a 3.7% higher evidence quality score, and reduced evidence hallucination rate by 19.63%.

arXiv:2608.23811v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Automated fact-checking is essential for ensuring the reliability of public health information, yet the biomedical domain poses unique challenges. Validating biomedical claims requires rigorous interpretation of scientific literature, assessment of retrieved evidence, and comprehensive justification toward the conclusion. Although Large Language Models LLMs enhanced by Retrieval-Augmented Generation RAG and agentic search perform automated fact-checking in a retrieve-then-verify paradigm, current methods still output isolated prediction labels, lacking explanatory depth and offers limited utility for human understanding. To bridge this gap, we introduce an LLM-based agent named BioCheck Agent that generates structured biomedical fact-checking reports with agentic search. Rather than merely outputting supported or refuted labels, our agent synthesizes final conclusions with retrieved evidence and rigorous analysis. To ensure domain-specific accuracy, BioCheck Agent exclusively searches high-quality scientific literature in PubMed, utilizing advanced Boolean search operators. Recognizing that direct prompting often results in hallucinations and low-quality reports, especially for lightweight open-source models, we further propose the Evidence-Grounded Group Relative Policy Optimization EG-GRPO to perform reinforcement learning on BioCheck Agent with a task-specific reward that incentivizes advanced search behavior and high-quality evidence retrieval while penalizing hallucinations. Our experimental results show that compared to the base model Qwen3.5-4B, BioCheck Agent with EG-GRPO improves label prediction accuracy on SciFact by 9.95%. Furthermore, it achieves a 3.7% higher evidence quality score and a 19.63% lower evidence hallucination rate, demonstrating its ability to generate biomedical fact-checking reports with improved accuracy and quality.