---
title: "STELLA: Self-Evolving LLM Agent for Biomedical Research (2025)"
description: "The authors argue that agents which build up tools and strategies over time can scale with the field… 23 references, cited by 12 papers here."
authors: ["Ruofan Jin", "Zaixi Zhang", "Mengdi Wang", "Le Cong"]
year: 2025
venue: "arXiv:2507.02004"
source: "https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.02004"
doi: "10.48550/arxiv.2507.02004"
arxiv: "2507.02004"
licence: "CC BY 4.0 (arXiv)"
licence_url: "http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"
summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License"
canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/jin-2025-stella-self-evolving-llm-agent/"
---
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# STELLA: Self-Evolving LLM Agent for Biomedical Research

**Authors:** Ruofan Jin, [Zaixi Zhang](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/zaixi-zhang/), [Mengdi Wang](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/mengdi-wang/) and Le Cong · **Year:** 2025 · **Venue:** arXiv:2507.02004 · **Licence:** [CC BY 4.0 (arXiv)](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

**Links:** [Publisher's page](https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.02004) · [PDF](https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.02004) · [DOI 10.48550/arxiv.2507.02004](https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2507.02004) · [arXiv 2507.02004](https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.02004) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W6948306691)

**Citations:** 2 citations (OpenAlex, 2026-10-14) · [12](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/jin-2025-stella-self-evolving-llm-agent/cited-by/) in our library, of the 149,439 papers whose bibliographies we read

## Summary
Biomedical research relies on a large and constantly changing collection of databases, software packages and publications. Most current LLM agents work with a fixed, hand-picked toolset, so they struggle to keep up. STELLA is a multi-agent system built to improve itself through use. A Manager Agent plans a stepwise reasoning pathway. A Dev Agent writes and runs Python code in its own conda environments. A Critic Agent reviews intermediate results and suggests fixes. A Tool Creation Agent closes capability gaps by locating, testing and adding new tools.

Two resources grow as the system works. The Template Library stores condensed workflows from solved problems. The Tool Ocean collects executable capabilities. On sampled subsets of Humanity's Last Exam (Biomedicine) and LAB-Bench (DBQA, LitQA), STELLA scores higher than the LLMs and agents it is compared with. Its HLE accuracy roughly doubles as the number of trials increases. The authors argue that agents which build up tools and strategies over time can scale with the field better than static ones.

## Key points
- Reported accuracy is about 26% on HLE: Biomedicine, about 54% on LAB-Bench DBQA and about 63% on LitQA. The margin over the next-best system is stated as up to 6 points in the abstract but up to 8 points in the main text.
- Evidence for self-evolution: HLE accuracy rises from 14% to 26% as the trial budget grows, averaged over three independent runs.
- The evaluation follows the Biomni and OriGene setups. For LAB-Bench, the authors used the same 12.5% sample of DBQA and LitQA, with multiple-choice answers and an abstention option. For HLE, they used 50 questions covering 14 biology and medicine subfields.
- The Tool Ocean contains three types of tools:
  - Database queries (PubMed, ClinVar, PDB).
  - Foundation-model interfaces (AlphaFold 3, scGPT, ESM3).
  - Custom scripts, for example for network analysis and data integration.
- In a case study on cisplatin resistance, STELLA analysed scRNA-seq data from before treatment and after relapse. It then built a virtual perturbation screen based on the STATE cell model and identified the transcription factor MTF1 as the key regulator.

*Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.*

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## Cite

Cite as: Ruofan Jin, Zaixi Zhang, Mengdi Wang and Le Cong. 2025. STELLA: Self-Evolving LLM Agent for Biomedical Research. arXiv:2507.02004.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

```bibtex
@misc{jin2025stella,
  title = {{STELLA: Self-Evolving LLM Agent for Biomedical Research}},
  author = {Ruofan Jin, Zaixi Zhang, Mengdi Wang and Le Cong},
  year = {2025},
  doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2507.02004},
  eprint = {2507.02004},
  archivePrefix = {arXiv},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2507.02004}
}
```

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## References

23 references, 7 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

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*Updated 3 November 2026*