18.6AIJul 10
L-MAD: A Systematic Evaluation of Multi-Agent Debate Structures in Legal ReasoningTan-Minh Nguyen, Hoang-Trung Nguyen, Huu-Dong Nguyen et al.
While multi-agent debate (MAD) frameworks have shown significant potential in general reasoning, their effectiveness in highly structured, knowledge-heavy legal domains remains under-explored. In this work, we introduce the Legal Multi-Agent Debate (L-MAD) framework to systematically evaluate different debate structures and aggregation methods within Legal Textual Entailment. By assigning distinct expert personas to multiple agents, L-MAD improves upon strong single-agent baselines by up to 8\%. Furthermore, analyzing how debate scales reveals a clear trade-off: increasing the agent population reduces inconsistency and improves accuracy, whereas extending discussion rounds induces a detrimental \textit{over-deliberation drift} where agents reinforce each other's mistakes. Ultimately, our findings outline the practical boundaries and safety margins of deploying collaborative multi-agent systems in high-stakes legal reasoning environments.
7.6CLApr 16Code
Fact4ac at the Financial Misinformation Detection Challenge Task: Reference-Free Financial Misinformation Detection via Fine-Tuning and Few-Shot Prompting of Large Language ModelsCuong Hoang, Le-Minh Nguyen
The proliferation of financial misinformation poses a severe threat to market stability and investor trust, misleading market behavior and creating critical information asymmetry. Detecting such misleading narratives is inherently challenging, particularly in real-world scenarios where external evidence or supplementary references for cross-verification are strictly unavailable. This paper presents our winning methodology for the "Reference-Free Financial Misinformation Detection" shared task. Built upon the recently proposed RFC-BENCH framework (Jiang et al. 2026), this task challenges models to determine the veracity of financial claims by relying solely on internal semantic understanding and contextual consistency, rather than external fact-checking. To address this formidable evaluation setup, we propose a comprehensive framework that capitalizes on the reasoning capabilities of state-of-the-art Large Language Models (LLMs). Our approach systematically integrates in-context learning, specifically zero-shot and few-shot prompting strategies, with Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) via Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) to optimally align the models with the subtle linguistic cues of financial manipulation. Our proposed system demonstrated superior efficacy, successfully securing the first-place ranking on both official leaderboards. Specifically, we achieved an accuracy of 95.4% on the public test set and 96.3% on the private test set, highlighting the robustness of our method and contributing to the acceleration of context-aware misinformation detection in financial Natural Language Processing. Our models (14B and 32B) are available at https://huggingface.co/KaiNKaiho.
1.4LGJan 29
Beyond Forgetting: Machine Unlearning Elicits Controllable Side Behaviors and CapabilitiesTien Dang, The-Hai Nguyen, Dinh Mai Phuong et al.
We consider representation misdirection (RM), a class of LLM unlearning methods that achieves forgetting by manipulating the forget-representations, that is, latent representations of forget samples. Despite being important, the roles of target vectors used in RM, however, remain underexplored. Here, we approach and revisit RM through the lens of the linear representation hypothesis. Specifically, if one can somehow identify a one-dimensional representation corresponding to a high-level concept, the linear representation hypothesis enables linear operations on this concept vector within the forget-representation space. Under this view, we hypothesize that, beyond forgetting, machine unlearning elicits controllable side behaviors and stronger side capabilities corresponding to the high-level concept. Our hypothesis is empirically validated across a wide range of tasks, including behavioral control (e.g., controlling unlearned models' truth, sentiment, and refusal) and capability enhancement (e.g., improving unlearned models' in-context learning capability). Our findings reveal that this fairly attractive phenomenon could be either a hidden risk if misused or a mechanism that can be harnessed for developing models that require stronger capabilities and controllable behaviors.
1.1CLJan 4
Can Legislation Be Made Machine-Readable in PROLEG?May-Myo Zin, Sabine Wehnert, Yuntao Kong et al.
The anticipated positive social impact of regulatory processes requires both the accuracy and efficiency of their application. Modern artificial intelligence technologies, including natural language processing and machine-assisted reasoning, hold great promise for addressing this challenge. We present a framework to address the challenge of tools for regulatory application, based on current state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods for natural language processing (large language models or LLMs) and formalization of legal reasoning (the legal representation system PROLEG). As an example, we focus on Article 6 of the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). In our framework, a single LLM prompt simultaneously transforms legal text into if-then rules and a corresponding PROLEG encoding, which are then validated and refined by legal domain experts. The final output is an executable PROLEG program that can produce human-readable explanations for instances of GDPR decisions. We describe processes to support the end-to-end transformation of a segment of a regulatory document (Article 6 from GDPR), including the prompting frame to guide an LLM to "compile" natural language text to if-then rules, then to further "compile" the vetted if-then rules to PROLEG. Finally, we produce an instance that shows the PROLEG execution. We conclude by summarizing the value of this approach and note observed limitations with suggestions to further develop such technologies for capturing and deploying regulatory frameworks.