Study: legal reasoning models citing legal provisions does not equal relying on legal provisions.
Uses premise permutation and hidden-layer tracing to audit whether legal chain-of-thought truly relies on the cited legal provisions.
- arXiv
- 2610.12361
- Published
- Layer
- Model layer
- Setting
- Models and APIs
- Evaluated models
- Qwen3-8B, Qwen3-14B, Llama-3.1-8B and others7
- AttacksPrompt injection
- ComponentReasoning chains
AbstractUsing counterfactual substitution of authorities and internal commitment tracing, the authors find that legal CoT rulings depend on authorities only to a limited extent and are vulnerable to prompt injection manipulation.
This study conducts an empirical audit of the causal truthfulness of legal citations in chain-of-thought reasoning of large language models in the legal domain.