BioAlchemy: Distilling Biological Literature into Reasoning-Ready Reinforcement Learning Training Data

Computer Science > Artificial Intelligence [Submitted on 3 Apr 2026] BioAlchemy: Distilling Biological Literature into Reasoning-Ready Reinforcement Learning Training Data Brian Hsu, Ozan Gökdemir, Carlo Siebenschuh, Bruce Parrello, Neil Getty, Thomas S. Brettin, Rick L. Stevens, Ian T. Foster, Nicholas Chia, Arvind Ramanathan Despite the large corpus of biology training text, the impact of reasoning models on biological research generally lags behind math and coding. In this work, we show that biology questions from current large-scale reasoning datasets do not align well with modern research topic distributions in biology, and that this topic imbalance may negatively affect performance. In addition, we find that methods for extracting challenging and verifiable research problems from biology research text are a critical yet underdeveloped ingredient in applying reinforcement learning for better performance on biology research tasks. We introduce BioAlchemy, a pipeline for sourcing a diverse set of verifiable question-and-answer pairs from a scientific corpus of biology research text. We curate BioAlchemy-345K, a training dataset containing over 345K scientific reasoning problems in biology. Then, we demonstrate how aligning our dataset to the topic distribution of modern scientific biology can be used with reinforcement learning to improve reasoning performance. Finally, we present BioAlchemist-8B, which improves over its base reasoning model by 9.12% on biology benchmarks. These results demonstrate the efficacy of our approach for developing stronger scientific reasoning capabilities in biology. The BioAlchemist-8B model is available at: this https URL. Subjects: Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI) ACM classes: I.2.6; I.2.7; J.3 Cite as: arXiv:2604.03506 [cs.AI]   (or arXiv:2604.03506v1 [cs.AI] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2604.03506 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Brian Hsu [view email] [v1] Fri, 3 Apr 2026 23:06:59 UTC (92 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.AI < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-04 Change to browse by: cs References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)