arXiv Machine Learning

A Machine Learning Theory Perspective on Strategic Litigation

arXiv:2506. 03411v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Strategic litigation involves bringing a case to court with the goal of having an impact beyond resolving the particular dispute at hand.

arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 12

Do Judges Behave Like Algorithms?

arXiv:2608. 10400v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: What if judges already behave like algorithms?

By Riya Manchanda, Eric Chen, Chloe Zhu, Cynthia Rudin, Brandon Garrett, Songman Kang
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 1

JPO: Juris Policy Optimization for Structured Legal Reasoning in Criminal Judgment Prediction

The paper introduces Juris Policy Optimization (JPO), a post‑training framework designed to enhance structured legal reasoning in Chinese criminal judgment prediction. JPO first trains models with teacher‑generated rationales to guide a four‑step reasoning process, then applies reinforcement learning using a composite reward that balances prediction accuracy, reasoning completeness, and cross‑step consistency. Experiments on several open‑source language models and three Chinese legal benchmarks demonstrate that JPO consistently outperforms both supervised fine‑tuning and standard reinforcement learning baselines in terms of judgment prediction and reasoning quality.

By Zhaolu Kang, Yantao Liu, Tailong Luo, Leqi Zheng, Lei Wei, Chenghua Zhu, Junhao Gong, Jiachen Qian, Eric Hanchen Jiang, Jiaxin Liu, Yuan Wang, Hao Zhang, Zixia Wang, Rong Fu, Zheng Lin, Richeng Xuan, Zhichao Hu
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 28

Legal Rule Induction: Towards Generalizable Principle Discovery from Analogous Judicial Precedents

The paper introduces Legal Rule Induction (LRI), a task that seeks to extract concise, generalizable doctrinal rules from analogous judicial precedents. It presents a reproducible pipeline for constructing LRI datasets and, using Chinese law, releases the first benchmark comprising 5,121 case sets (38,088 court cases) for training and 216 expert‑annotated gold test sets. Experiments show that state‑of‑the‑art large language models struggle with over‑generalization and hallucination, but training on the new dataset significantly improves their ability to capture nuanced rule patterns across similar cases.

By Wei Fan, Tianshi Zheng, Yiran Hu, Zheye Deng, Weiqi Wang, Baixuan Xu, Chunyang Li, Haoran Li, Weixing Shen, Yangqiu Song
arXiv AI
Sep 3

OBJECTION! Lawyer Agents Mitigate Guilty Bias in Legal Judgment Prediction

The paper introduces OBJECTION, an inference-time pipeline that adds an Adversarial Lawyer Agent to each of the three reasoning steps—offense, unlawfulness, and culpability—in legal judgment prediction models. By actively injecting defense arguments, the agent challenges the model’s default assumption of guilt, which is common in datasets biased toward guilty outcomes. Using a new Natural Innocent dataset of 3.4k real cases, OBJECTION reduces the False Guilty Rate from 82.93% to 16.69%, demonstrating significant improvement in substantive legal reasoning.

By Jaehoon Jeong, Jay-Yoon Lee
arXiv AI
Jul 7

Shortcut Learning in Legal Judgment Prediction: Empirical Evidence from the UK Employment Tribunal

arXiv:2607. 04261v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Current Legal Judgment Prediction (LJP) is constrained by its reliance on post-hoc judicial materials, increasing the likelihood that models perform retrospective classification rather than true forecasting.

By Joe Watson, Joana Ribeiro de Faria, Marcus Tomalin, M{\aa}ns Magnusson, Huiyuan Xie, Hao Tian Yeung, Felix Steffek
arXiv AI
Aug 18

When Do LLMs Apply the Wrong Law? Diagnosing LLM Failures in Temporal Legal Reasoning

arXiv:2608. 14610v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Legal reasoning tasks such as legal judgment prediction (LJP) require identifying the temporally correct version of the law governing a case -- a capability we term temporal applicable-law determination.

By Yiqian Huang, Shuyuan Zheng, Qianying Liu, Shaowen Peng, Yuntao Kong, Kotaro Funakoshi, Chuan Xiao, Manabu Okumura, Yang Cao
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 22

Can LLMs Time Travel? Enhancing Temporal Consistency in Legal Agentic Search through Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2605.25920v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: While large language models (LLMs) augmented with agentic search capabilities show promise for legal reasoning, they overlook a fundamental constra...

By Wei Fan, Yining Zhou, Mufan Zhang, Yanbing Weng, Yiran HU, Tianshi Zheng, Baixuan Xu, Chunyang Li, Jianhui Yang, Haoran Li, Yangqiu Song
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 29

Non-Linear Strategic Classification Made Practical

arXiv:2606. 28204v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Algorithmic developments in Strategic Classification have been mostly limited to linear classifiers in settings where the best response has a closed-form solution or can be easily approximated.

By Jack Geary, Boyan Gao, Henry Gouk
arXiv AI
Aug 11

PROSLEX: A Novel Dataset for Expert-Annotated Legal Statute Prediction for Indian Judiciary

arXiv:2608. 08830v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Legal Statute Prediction (LSP) involves automatically identifying relevant legal statutes given factual descriptions in legal documents, typically framed as a multi-label classification task within natural language processing and information retrieval research.

By Subinay Adhikary, Upal Bhattacharya, Vivek Kumar Singh, Anurag Sharma, Shubham Kumar Nigam, Suvasis Das, Shouvik Kumar Guha, Koustav Rudra, Kripabandhu Ghosh