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BioScanCast

BioScanCast is an open source pipeline for biosecurity forecasting using LLMs and automated web retrieval.

The system retrieves internet sources, filters relevant documents, extracts structured information, and is intended to support probabilistic forecasting and evaluation against human forecasters.

Current repository contents include:

  • modular pipeline stages
  • shared schemas and LLM abstractions
  • retrieval and extraction tooling
  • benchmarking and evaluation infrastructure
  • smoke-test and operational scripts

The forecasting stage is not yet implemented.

Project Goals

  1. Build an open source forecasting system for biosecurity questions.
  2. Benchmark model forecasts against human forecasters.
  3. Provide a reproducible research pipeline suitable for publication.
  4. Produce accessible technical and public-facing outputs.

Pipeline Status

Implemented:

Search -> Filtering -> Extraction -> Insight

Planned:

Forecasting

Current capabilities include:

  • LLM query decomposition
  • web/news retrieval via Tavily
  • heuristic + optional LLM filtering
  • HTML/PDF extraction and chunking
  • hybrid BM25 + embedding retrieval
  • structured fact extraction with provenance tracking

Pipeline Overview

1. Search Stage

Collect candidate internet sources.

Features:

  • LLM query decomposition
  • Tavily retrieval backend
  • source tier scoring
  • dashboard injection
  • URL normalization + deduplication

Output:

List[SearchResult]

2. Filtering Stage

Identify credible and relevant sources.

Features:

  • heuristic relevance scoring
  • source credibility scoring
  • duplicate removal
  • optional LLM review
  • extraction-priority assignment

Output:

List[FilteredDocument]

3. Extraction Stage

Fetch and normalize source content.

Features:

  • HTML/PDF fetching
  • HTML/PDF parsing
  • table extraction
  • chunk normalization
  • metadata extraction

Output:

List[Document]

4. Insight Stage

Convert extracted text into structured facts.

Features:

  • BM25 retrieval
  • embedding retrieval
  • hybrid reranking
  • structured fact extraction
  • provenance tracking
  • hallucination filtering
  • cross-document deduplication

Output:

List[InsightRecord]

Design principle:

one chunk -> one extraction call

Each fact must include:

  • supporting quote
  • source chunk
  • source URL

Facts failing substring verification are discarded.

Current limitations:

  • disconnected from extraction outputs in smoke tests
  • no temporal reasoning layer
  • no forecasting integration

5. Forecasting Stage

Planned but not implemented.

Intended responsibilities:

  • probabilistic forecasting
  • calibration
  • confidence estimation
  • forecast evaluation

Repository Structure

bioscancast/
├── bioscancast/
│   ├── datasets/      Source registries and tier definitions
│   ├── extraction/    Fetching, parsing, and chunking
│   ├── filtering/     Relevance filtering and reranking
│   ├── insight/       Retrieval and insight extraction
│   ├── llm/           LLM client abstractions
│   ├── schemas/       Shared data models
│   ├── stages/
│   │   ├── search_stage/
│   │   └── eval_stage/
│   └── tests/         Unit and integration tests
├── data/
│   ├── raw/
│   ├── processed/
│   └── docling_eval/
├── evaluation/
├── scripts/
├── pyproject.toml
├── requirements.txt
└── README.md

Core Modules

Module Purpose
datasets/ curated source registries and source tiers
extraction/ fetching, parsing, chunking
filtering/ source filtering and ranking
insight/ retrieval and fact extraction
llm/ model abstractions
schemas/ shared structured contracts
stages/search_stage/ retrieval stage
stages/eval_stage/ evaluation tooling

Stage Details

Search Stage

bioscancast/stages/search_stage/

Implemented modules:

File Purpose
pipeline.py orchestration
query_decomposition.py LLM sub-query generation
tier_resolution.py source credibility scoring
dashboard_lookup.py dashboard injection
url_normalization.py canonicalization + dedup
backends/tavily_backend.py Tavily backend

Current features:

  • 5–8 LLM-generated subqueries
  • backend abstraction via SearchBackend
  • source tier + freshness scoring
  • aggregator-domain flagging
  • non-content URL filtering

Known limitations:

  • English-only retrieval
  • hardcoded dashboard mappings
  • no multilingual retrieval

Filtering Stage

bioscancast/filtering/

Implemented modules:

File Purpose
pipeline.py orchestration
heuristics.py heuristic scoring
llm_filter.py LLM adjudication
reranker.py borderline reranking
deduplication.py duplicate handling
postprocess.py extraction-priority assignment

Current features:

  • heuristic relevance scoring
  • source credibility scoring
  • optional LLM review
  • domain caps
  • extraction-mode assignment

Extraction Stage

bioscancast/extraction/

Implemented modules:

File Purpose
pipeline.py orchestration
fetcher.py network retrieval
chunking.py chunk normalization
parsers/html_parser.py HTML extraction
parsers/pdf_parser.py PDF extraction
docling_refiner.py optional table refinement

Current features:

  • browser-fingerprinted fetching via curl_cffi
  • BeautifulSoup + trafilatura HTML parsing
  • PyMuPDF PDF parsing
  • pdfplumber table fallback
  • chunk normalization
  • metadata extraction
  • document-level provenance tracking

PDF Table Extraction (Docling Refiner)

The default PDF pipeline uses PyMuPDF + pdfplumber with an optional Docling TableFormer refinement pass.

The first refinement run downloads Docling models (~40 MB) into:

~/.cache/huggingface/

Models remain resident in memory (~1.5 GB) for the process lifetime.

Controlled via:

ExtractionConfig.enable_docling_refiner

When disabled, no Docling imports occur.

Current limitations:

  • OCR not implemented
  • scanned PDFs return requires_ocr
  • no persistent document store
  • extraction is currently in-memory only

Insight Stage

bioscancast/insight/

Implemented modules:

File Purpose
pipeline.py orchestration
retrieval/bm25.py lexical retrieval
retrieval/embeddings.py embedding retrieval
retrieval/hybrid.py hybrid reranking
extraction/chunk_extractor.py fact extraction

Current features:

  • BM25 retrieval
  • embedding similarity retrieval
  • hybrid scoring
  • keyword reranking
  • chunk-level extraction
  • quote-based hallucination guards
  • provenance linking
  • cross-document deduplication

Evaluation

bioscancast/stages/eval_stage/

Implemented modules:

File Purpose
evaluator.py orchestration
scoring.py forecast scoring
calibration.py calibration metrics
compare.py model vs human comparison
visualisation.py plots and reporting

Repository datasets:

bioscancast_forecasts.csv
bioscancast_questions.csv

Schemas

bioscancast/schemas/

Shared stage contracts.

Key schemas:

File Purpose
document.py extracted documents + chunks
insight_record.py extracted facts

Additional filtering models live in:

bioscancast/filtering/models.py

including:

  • ForecastQuestion
  • SearchResult
  • FilteredDocument

Stages should communicate through schemas rather than raw dictionaries.

LLM Integration

bioscancast/llm/

Current files:

File Purpose
base.py shared protocol + token accounting
client.py legacy/simple OpenAI wrapper
openai_client.py structured extraction client
fake_client.py testing client

The repository currently contains two partially overlapping interfaces:

bioscancast/llm/base.py
bioscancast/llm/client.py

These should eventually be unified.

Historical-replay mode (benchmarking against human forecasters)

When benchmarking the pipeline against human forecasters on past questions, the model must not be allowed to see sources that didn't exist (or contained different content) at the time the human forecasted. Historical-replay mode enforces this by reading a single per-question field, ForecastQuestion.as_of_date:

  • When as_of_date is None (default), the pipeline behaves exactly as in live mode. No code paths change.
  • When as_of_date is set, the search backend receives end_date=as_of_date, the cache key incorporates the cutoff, post-retrieval filtering drops any result dated after the cutoff (and any undated result whose date cannot be cheaply recovered), dashboard URLs are rewritten to the closest Wayback snapshot at or before the cutoff (or suppressed if none exists), and the extraction stage fetches from Wayback. Wayback fallback to live is logged at INFO and recorded in Document.fetch_strategy, never silent.

The LLM "historical roleplay" prompt is not automatically enabled by as_of_date; it lives behind a separate historical_roleplay=True flag on SearchStagePipeline because its effect on query quality is harder to predict. Turn it on for the benchmark and off for production.

What this mode does NOT fix: the LLMs themselves were trained on data that postdates many of our benchmark questions. Retrieval fairness ≠ model fairness. The retrieval_free_baseline_forecast metric in bioscancast/stages/eval_stage/contamination.py reports how well the LLM forecasts with no evidence at all; a small gap between that and the full pipeline is itself evidence of training-data leakage and must be reported alongside the headline Brier/log scores.

filter_caught_contamination_rate is also exposed by the same module. It is a lower bound on contamination — it only counts post-cutoff results whose published_date is known. Undated results and results whose content changed post-cutoff are invisible to it. Reports MUST surface this caveat; the metric's docstring repeats it for the same reason.

Datasets

bioscancast/datasets/

Curated source definitions and credibility tiers.

File Purpose
biosecurity_sources.py curated source registry
source_tiers.py source credibility tiers

Scripts

scripts/

Operational and smoke-test utilities.

Script Purpose
run_search_stage.py run search stage
run_filtering.py run filtering stage
run_extraction.py run extraction stage
run_insight.py run insight smoke test
eval_docling.py Docling evaluation
eval_hybrid_pdf.py PDF extraction benchmarking

Scripts are intended for operational workflows rather than reusable library APIs.

Running the Pipeline

Environment Setup

python -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt

Additional packages:

pip install openai tavily-python python-dotenv

Environment Variables

Create .env:

OPENAI_API_KEY=sk-...
TAVILY_API_KEY=tvly-...

Search Stage

python scripts/run_search_stage.py \
  "Will H5N1 cause more than 100 human cases in the US by December 2026?" \
  --pathogen h5n1 \
  --region "United States"

Optional JSON output:

python scripts/run_search_stage.py \
  "How many mpox cases will be reported globally by June 2026?" \
  --pathogen mpox \
  --output data/search_results.json

Filtering Stage

python scripts/run_filtering.py

Current limitation:

  • uses hardcoded sample inputs rather than automatic search-stage ingestion

Output:

data/filtered_results.json

Extraction Stage

Smoke-test mode:

python scripts/run_extraction.py

Using filtered-document JSON:

python scripts/run_extraction.py \
  --input data/filtered_results.json

Output:

data/extraction_results.json

Insight Stage

python scripts/run_insight.py

Current limitation:

  • uses synthetic documents rather than extraction outputs

Closest Current End-to-End Flow

python scripts/run_search_stage.py \
  "Will mpox cases increase in Uganda in 2026?" \
  --pathogen mpox \
  --region Uganda \
  --output data/search_results.json && \
python scripts/run_filtering.py && \
python scripts/run_extraction.py \
  --input data/filtered_results.json

bioscancast/main.py currently contains pseudocode only and is not yet a runnable orchestrator.

Tests

bioscancast/tests/

Includes:

  • extraction tests
  • retrieval tests
  • pipeline tests
  • schema validation
  • search-stage integration tests

Run all tests:

pytest

Run selected tests:

pytest bioscancast/tests/test_extraction_pipeline.py
pytest bioscancast/tests/test_insight_pipeline.py

Live fetch tests are marked:

@pytest.mark.live

and skipped by default.

Run with:

pytest --live

Dependencies

Important dependencies:

Dependency Usage
curl_cffi browser-fingerprinted HTTP fetching
rank_bm25 lexical retrieval
PyMuPDF primary PDF parsing
pdfplumber fallback PDF table extraction

curl_cffi is used in:

bioscancast/extraction/fetcher.py

The impersonation profile is configurable via:

ExtractionConfig.impersonate

Development Principles

  1. Keep pipeline stages modular.
  2. Use schemas between stages.
  3. Prefer structured interfaces over raw dictionaries.
  4. Keep experimental workflows in scripts or notebooks.
  5. Prioritize reproducibility.
  6. Treat provenance and auditability as first-class concerns.

Known Architectural Gaps

Major missing components:

  1. unified end-to-end orchestrator
  2. extraction → insight integration
  3. OCR support
  4. forecasting stage implementation
  5. persistent storage/vector DB layer
  6. unified LLM abstraction
  7. multilingual retrieval

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A large language model integrated with web scraping capabilities that produces forecasts on biosecurity-related questions by automatically gathering and analysing information from across the internet.

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