Xin Gao
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2026
BioTool: A Comprehensive Tool-Calling Dataset for Enhancing Biomedical Capabilities of Large Language Models
Xin Gao | Ruiyi Zhang | Meixi Du | Peijia Qin | Pengtao Xie
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Xin Gao | Ruiyi Zhang | Meixi Du | Peijia Qin | Pengtao Xie
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
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.
2025
Can Prompts Rewind Time for LLMs? Evaluating the Effectiveness of Prompted Knowledge Cutoffs
Xin Gao | Ruiyi Zhang | Daniel Du | Saurabh Mahindre | Sai Ashish Somayajula | Pengtao Xie
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Xin Gao | Ruiyi Zhang | Daniel Du | Saurabh Mahindre | Sai Ashish Somayajula | Pengtao Xie
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Large Language Models (LLMs) are widely used for temporal prediction, but their reliance on pretraining data raises contamination concerns, as accurate predictions on pre-cutoff test data may reflect memorization rather than reasoning, leading to an overestimation of their generalization capability. With the recent emergence of prompting-based unlearning techniques, a natural question arises: Can LLMs be prompted to simulate an earlier knowledge cutoff? In this work, we investigate the capability of prompting to simulate earlier knowledge cutoff in LLMs. We construct three evaluation datasets to assess the extent to which LLMs can forget (1) direct factual knowledge, (2) semantic shifts, and (3) causally related knowledge. Results demonstrate that while prompt-based simulated knowledge cutoffs show effectiveness when directly queried with the information after that date, they struggle to induce forgetting when the forgotten content is not directly asked but causally related to the query. These findings highlight the need for more rigorous evaluation settings when applying LLMs for temporal prediction tasks. The full dataset and evaluation code are available at https://github.com/gxx27/time_unlearn.