# Harnessing Collective Intelligence of LLMs for Robust Biomedical QA: A Multi-Model Approach

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.01480 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.01480/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 3 of its 16 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Aug 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [BioBERT: a pre-trained biomedical language representation model for biomedical text mining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.08746/) (2019)
- [Domain-Specific Language Model Pretraining for Biomedical Natural Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.15779/) (2020)
- [Sparse Meets Dense: A Hybrid Approach to Enhance Scientific Document Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.04055/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Overview of BioASQ 2025: The Thirteenth BioASQ Challenge on Large-Scale Biomedical Semantic Indexing and Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.20554/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Biomedical text mining and question-answering are essential yet highly demanding tasks, particularly in the face of the exponential growth of biomedical literature. In this work, we present our participation in the 13th edition of the BioASQ challenge, which involves biomedical semantic question-answering for Task 13b and biomedical question-answering for developing topics for the Synergy task. We deploy a selection of open-source large language models (LLMs) as retrieval-augmented generators to answer biomedical questions. Various models are used to process the questions. A majority voting system combines their output to determine the final answer for Yes/No questions, while for list and factoid type questions, the union of their answers in used. We evaluated 13 state-of-the-art open source LLMs, exploring all possible model combinations to contribute to the final answer, resulting in tailored LLM pipelines for each question type. Our findings provide valuable insight into which combinations of LLMs consistently produce superior results for specific question types. In the four rounds of the 2025 BioASQ challenge, our system achieved notable results: in the Synergy task, we secured 1st place for ideal answers and 2nd place for exact answers in round 2, as well as two shared 1st places for exact answers in round 3 and 4.
