25.7CLJun 11
DLawBench: Evaluating LLMs Through Multi-Turn Legal ConsultationLi Zhang, Yuzhen Shi, Yiran Hu et al.
Lawyer-client consultation is a critical starting point for legal services. Effective legal assistance hinges on eliciting sufficient and truthful information from clients in order to devise strategies that best protect their interests. This task requires Large Language Models (LLMs) not only to perform robust legal reasoning, but also to strategically elicit material facts through multi-turn interactions and effectively guide clients with diverse personalities. Yet existing legal benchmarks overlook this interactive capability. To fill this gap, we introduce DLawBench, a diagnostic benchmark for real-world legal consultation. Drawing on realistic client behavior, we characterize lawyer-client interactions into four types: Cooperative, Dependent, Withdrawn, and Adversarial. Using dialogues grounded in real cases, DLawBench evaluates whether LLMs can effectively conduct legal consultation under realistic conditions. DLawBench comprises 461 cases from Chinese and U.S. law, 5,532 paired fact entries, 3,411 inquiry rubrics, and 3,348 issue-resolution rubrics, and evaluates 26 representative LLMs. Systematic experiments show substantial headroom: the best-performing model, GPT-5.5, achieves only 0.562 on consultation-grounded legal reasoning. More importantly, DLawBench exposes both sycophancy in legal consultation and a paradox: models perform worse when clients need guidance most.
10.1SEJun 12
Empowering Student Debugging in Parallel Programming with Execution Traces and Large Language ModelsGod'salvation F. Oguibe, Vinodh Kumaran Jayakumar, Tongping Liu et al.
Concurrent programming is a core component of Computer Science curricula, yet remains notoriously difficult for students to master due to its inherent complexity and the nondeterministic nature of concurrency bugs such as deadlocks and race conditions. In this work, we present ParaView, an educational tool designed to help students understand, debug, and correct concurrency issues in parallel programs written in C/C++. ParaView provides transparent execution recording and visualization to make parallel execution observable and comprehensible. We evaluated ParaView through a series of debugging and implementation tasks, with 17 students participating. Results showed a significant improvement in debugging and implementation successes compared to previous course iterations. A student survey confirmed that most participants found ParaView helpful. To further support learning outside the classroom, we explored using Large Language Models (LLMs) to analyze concurrency bugs and suggest fixes. While LLMs were highly effective in identifying bugs and explaining execution traces, the correctness of their bug fixes varied, especially for more complex synchronization patterns. Our findings suggest that recording-visualization tools like ParaView, complemented by artificial intelligence (AI), can improve teaching and learning of concurrent programming.