Paper Detail

BioTool: A Comprehensive Tool-Calling Dataset for Enhancing Biomedical Capabilities of Large Language Models

Xin Gao, Ruiyi Zhang, Meixi Du, Peijia Qin, Pengtao Xie

huggingface Score 13.0

Published 2026-05-07 · First seen 2026-05-09

Research Track A · General AI

Abstract

Despite the success of large language models (LLMs) on general-purpose tasks, their performance in highly specialized domains such as biomedicine remains unsatisfactory. A key limitation is the inability of LLMs to effectively leverage biomedical tools, which clinical experts and biomedical researchers rely on extensively in daily workflows. While recent general-domain tool-calling datasets have substantially improved the capabilities of LLM agents, existing efforts in the biomedical domain largely rely on in-context learning and restrict models to a small set of tools. To address this gap, we introduce BioTool, a comprehensive biomedical tool-calling dataset designed for fine-tuning LLMs. BioTool comprises 34 frequently used tools collected from the NCBI, Ensembl, and UniProt databases, along with 7,040 high-quality, human-verified query-API call pairs spanning variation, genomics, proteomics, evolution, and general biology. Fine-tuning a 4-billion-parameter LLM on BioTool yields substantial improvements in biomedical tool-calling performance, outperforming cutting-edge commercial LLMs such as GPT-5.1. Furthermore, human expert evaluations demonstrate that integrating a BioTool-fine-tuned tool caller significantly improves downstream answer quality compared to the same LLM without tool usage, highlighting the effectiveness of BioTool in enhancing the biomedical capabilities of LLMs. The full dataset and evaluation code are available at https://github.com/gxx27/BioTool

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BibTeX

@misc{gao2026biotool,
  title = {BioTool: A Comprehensive Tool-Calling Dataset for Enhancing Biomedical Capabilities of Large Language Models},
  author = {Xin Gao and Ruiyi Zhang and Meixi Du and Peijia Qin and Pengtao Xie},
  year = {2026},
  abstract = {Despite the success of large language models (LLMs) on general-purpose tasks, their performance in highly specialized domains such as biomedicine remains unsatisfactory. A key limitation is the inability of LLMs to effectively leverage biomedical tools, which clinical experts and biomedical researchers rely on extensively in daily workflows. While recent general-domain tool-calling datasets have substantially improved the capabilities of LLM agents, existing efforts in the biomedical domain larg},
  url = {https://huggingface.co/papers/2605.05758},
  keywords = {large language models, tool-calling, fine-tuning, biomedical domain, NCBI, Ensembl, UniProt, API call pairs, genomics, proteomics, evolution, biological research, code available, huggingface daily},
  eprint = {2605.05758},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
}

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