arXiv AI

Beyond Case Law: Evaluating Structure-Aware Retrieval and Safety in Statute-Centric Legal QA

arXiv:2604. 06173v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Legal QA benchmarks have predominantly focused on case law, overlooking the unique challenges of statute-centric regulatory reasoning.

arXiv AI
2d ago

Legal Research Bench: Measuring End-to-End Reliability in Long-Horizon Legal Research Agents

Legal Research Bench (LRB) is a new benchmark comprising 413 open-ended U.S. legal research questions, each paired with a gold answer, supporting authorities, and a binary grading rubric. The study evaluates thirteen advanced language‑model agents using web search, case‑law search, page parsing, and retrieval tools, scoring responses only when all required criteria are met and cited authorities verify. Results show that even the best model, Claude Opus 4.8, achieves full correctness on only 42.9% of questions, with performance varying by legal area and task complexity, and no clear link between more tool calls or inference cost and higher accuracy.

By Katrina Drozdov, Oliver Chen, Langston Nashold, Rayan Krishnan
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
Jun 9

From Statute to Control Flow: Span-Grounded Deontic Trees for Defeasible Scope Parsing

arXiv:2606. 08932v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Rule-following agents tasked with executing policies and regulations often fail via Silent Scope Omission (SSO): a model applies a general rule but silently drops nested exceptions or counter-exceptions, producing outputs that appear compliant yet break on important edge cases.

By Jian Chen, Siyuan Li, Chucheng Wan, Zixuan Yuan
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 14

Tasks over Application Manuals: Revealing Gaps in Long-Horizon Procedural Reasoning for Language Models

The paper introduces Tasks over Application Manuals (TAM), a benchmark designed to test long‑horizon procedural reasoning in large language models. TAM uses real‑world tasks from ICD‑10‑CM clinical coding and U.S. federal sentencing, requiring models to follow extensive, rule‑based manuals and perform interdependent steps to produce exact answers. Experiments with GPT‑5 and various prompting strategies show very low exact‑match accuracy—1% for coding and 15.5% for sentencing—highlighting a gap between current benchmarks and the ability to reliably follow complex procedures.

By Utkarsh Soni, Syed Shariyar Murtaza, Yifan Nie, Sachin Chandrasekhar, Eugene Wen
arXiv AI
Sep 25

Automated Regulatory Compliance Question Answering in Financial Services with Domain-Adapted Retrieval-Augmented Generation

The paper presents a retrieval‑augmented generation pipeline for answering regulatory compliance questions in finance. It builds a three‑stage retriever on LegalBERT and a compact 2B–12B generator served with 4‑bit quantization, achieving a Recall@10 of 0.774 on the ObliQA benchmark and improving answer quality via RAFT‑LoRA fine‑tuning. However, the adapted models fail to transfer to Australian case‑law questions, and a closed‑book model performs almost as well while lacking verifiable grounding.

By Tobias Deu{\ss}er, Abhishek Pillai, Aurelio F. Bariviera, Dhananjay Bhardwaj, Lorenz Sparrenberg, David Berghaus, Christian Bauckhage, Rafet Sifa
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