SSE-Bio: A Structured Self-Evolving Agent with Agentic Retrieval Policy for Multi-Hop Biomedical Reasoning

arXiv:2608.22132v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Biomedical multi-hop question answering (QA) requires models to connect evidence across intermediate entities such as diseases, drugs, proteins, and phenotypes. Existing agents typically rely on static retrieval workflows or coarse-grained prompt rewriting, which can lead to instruction drift when reasoning procedures need to be updated. We propose SSE-Bio, a structured self-evolving agent with an agentic retrieval policy for multi-hop biomedical reasoning. Instead of globally rewriting agent instructions, SSE-Bio maintains a structured state, selectively retrieves knowledge triplets and prior templates through a trainable proxy policy, and improves its reasoning memory through fine-grained template editing. To optimise retrieval decisions, we introduce a proxy-training strategy based on group relative policy optimization, where the proxy is improved through decision-contrastive groups over alternative retrieval choices. Experiments on three biomedical multi-hop QA benchmarks show that SSE-Bio consistently outperforms existing baselines, achieving an improvement of 6.56 absolute points over the strongest self-evolving baseline on BioHopR.

Abstract:Biomedical multi-hop question answering (QA) requires models to connect evidence across intermediate entities such as diseases, drugs, proteins, and phenotypes. Existing agents typically rely on static retrieval workflows or coarse-grained prompt rewriting, which can lead to instruction drift when reasoning procedures need to be updated. We propose SSE-Bio, a structured self-evolving agent with an agentic retrieval policy for multi-hop biomedical reasoning. Instead of globally rewriting agent instructions, SSE-Bio maintains a structured state, selectively retrieves knowledge triplets and prior templates through a trainable proxy policy, and improves its reasoning memory through fine-grained template editing. To optimise retrieval decisions, we introduce a proxy-training strategy based on group relative policy optimization, where the proxy is improved through decision-contrastive groups over alternative retrieval choices. Experiments on three biomedical multi-hop QA benchmarks show that SSE-Bio consistently outperforms existing baselines, achieving an improvement of 6.56 absolute points over the strongest self-evolving baseline on BioHopR.

Computation and Language (cs.CL); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Computational Engineering, Finance, and Science (cs.CE)

arXiv:2608.22132 [cs.CL]

(or arXiv:2608.22132v1 [cs.CL] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.22132 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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SSE-Bio: A Structured Self-Evolving Agent with Agentic Retrieval Policy for Multi-Hop Biomedical Reasoning

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