FindLink: Learning to Assess Scientific Connections from Source-Grounded Premises
Jingxuan Wei, Song Tan, Xiaohan Liu, Chao Sang, Changwei Wang, Linzhuang Sun, Bihui Yu, Fuqiang Wang, Junnan Zhu
Abstract
Scientific discovery from the literature requires assessing connections among findings obtained under different study conditions. Source attribution makes individual findings traceable, but does not determine what they jointly support. We introduce GI-TraceBench, a benchmark of 10,282 questions in gastrointestinal oncology that unifies provenance question answering, knowledge discovery, and hypothesis evaluation through shared Paper, Claim, and Evidence Span records. We further propose FindLink, a two-stage framework for provenance-grounded scientific reasoning. Premise Grounding constructs source-bound premises with explicit study context and support status. Structured Reasoning organizes these premises into support plans that represent both supported relations and unresolved conditions, then generates evidence-conditioned answers using deterministic compiler feedback. The compiler verifies structural and source-binding consistency, but does not assess scientific entailment. On the 1,545-question fixed-evidence test set, FindLink improves the balanced family macro score from 67.95 to 87.25 over direct supervised fine-tuning of the same backbone. A retrained variant without Structured Reasoning achieves slightly higher premise-identifier F1, but substantially lower relation and evidence-sufficiency F1. These results indicate that scientific reasoning requires not only identifying grounded premises, but also assessing what connections those premises support.