An Expert-Curated Benchmark for Frontier and Local LLMs Querying a Biomedical Knowledge Graph

Journal: bioRxiv
Published Date:

Abstract

We combine GeneNetwork's 1TB structured database with its metadata as an RDF graph and an associated literature corpus. We benchmark frontier and local LLMs querying it through four architectures: document, graph and agentic retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and a combination of the three. We evaluate them on 40 domain specific expert-curated questions with a new metric: the satisfaction frequency psi (psi, i.e, the share of questions answered with precision and recall of at least 70% or an f1 of at least 60%). psi ranks systems the same way precision, recall and f1 -- a machine learning metric built from the harmonic mean of precision and recall -- but is easier to read and assess for humans. System architecture had a large effect: with full use of Claude Opus 4.8 the plain document RAG of our earlier GNQA system had a psi of 36% against 86% for our new combined tools. Delegating most of the work from Claude Opus 4.8 to a local model halved query costs while still reaching a psi of 59%.

Authors

  • Medagbe
  • J. F. P.; Kilyungi
  • B. M.; Isaac
  • A.; Kabua
  • A.; Lisso
  • F.; Wambua
  • S.; Williams
  • R. W.; Prins
  • P.

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