Law
Thinking Machines: A Survey of LLM based Reasoning Strategies
Bandyopadhyay, Dibyanayan, Bhattacharjee, Soham, Ekbal, Asif
Large Language Models (LLMs) are highly proficient in language-based tasks. Their language capabilities have positioned them at the forefront of the future AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) race. However, on closer inspection, Valmeekam et al. (2024); Zecevic et al. (2023); Wu et al. (2024) highlight a significant gap between their language proficiency and reasoning abilities. Reasoning in LLMs and Vision Language Models (VLMs) aims to bridge this gap by enabling these models to think and re-evaluate their actions and responses. Reasoning is an essential capability for complex problem-solving and a necessary step toward establishing trust in Artificial Intelligence (AI). This will make AI suitable for deployment in sensitive domains, such as healthcare, banking, law, defense, security etc. In recent times, with the advent of powerful reasoning models like OpenAI O1 and DeepSeek R1, reasoning endowment has become a critical research topic in LLMs. In this paper, we provide a detailed overview and comparison of existing reasoning techniques and present a systematic survey of reasoning-imbued language models. We also study current challenges and present our findings.
DarkBench: Benchmarking Dark Patterns in Large Language Models
Kran, Esben, Nguyen, Hieu Minh "Jord", Kundu, Akash, Jawhar, Sami, Park, Jinsuk, Jurewicz, Mateusz Maria
Measuring these dark patterns is essential for understanding and mitigating the potential manipulative behaviors of LLMs. While some patterns, like Brand Bias and User Retention, were adapted directly from known dark patterns in UI/UX, others, like Harmful Generation and Anthropomorphization, represent critical risks not explicitly addressed in Brignull and Darlo (2010)'s taxonomy. Table 4 demonstrates how these categories map to or expand on established dark patterns, providing a foundation for their inclusion. However, some risks, particularly Anthropomorphization and Harmful Generation, require additional justification. Anthropomorphization, the attribution of human-like characteristics to AI systems, has been identified as a key factor in enhancing user engagement and trust.
Word-level Annotation of GDPR Transparency Compliance in Privacy Policies using Large Language Models
Cory, Thomas, Rieder, Wolf, Krämer, Julia, Raschke, Philip, Herbke, Patrick, Küpper, Axel
Ensuring transparency of data practices related to personal information is a fundamental requirement under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), particularly as mandated by Articles 13 and 14. However, assessing compliance at scale remains a challenge due to the complexity and variability of privacy policy language. Manual audits are resource-intensive and inconsistent, while existing automated approaches lack the granularity needed to capture nuanced transparency disclosures. In this paper, we introduce a large language model (LLM)-based framework for word-level GDPR transparency compliance annotation. Our approach comprises a two-stage annotation pipeline that combines initial LLM-based annotation with a self-correction mechanism for iterative refinement. This annotation pipeline enables the systematic identification and fine-grained annotation of transparency-related content in privacy policies, aligning with 21 GDPR-derived transparency requirements. To enable large-scale analysis, we compile a dataset of 703,791 English-language policies, from which we generate a sample of 200 manually annotated privacy policies. To evaluate our approach, we introduce a two-tiered methodology assessing both label- and span-level annotation performance. We conduct a comparative analysis of eight high-profile LLMs, providing insights into their effectiveness in identifying GDPR transparency disclosures. Our findings contribute to advancing the automation of GDPR compliance assessments and provide valuable resources for future research in privacy policy analysis.
Charting and Navigating Hugging Face's Model Atlas
Horwitz, Eliahu, Kurer, Nitzan, Kahana, Jonathan, Amar, Liel, Hoshen, Yedid
As there are now millions of publicly available neural networks, searching and analyzing large model repositories becomes increasingly important. Navigating so many models requires an atlas, but as most models are poorly documented charting such an atlas is challenging. To explore the hidden potential of model repositories, we chart a preliminary atlas representing the documented fraction of Hugging Face. It provides stunning visualizations of the model landscape and evolution. We demonstrate several applications of this atlas including predicting model attributes (e.g., accuracy), and analyzing trends in computer vision models. However, as the current atlas remains incomplete, we propose a method for charting undocumented regions. Specifically, we identify high-confidence structural priors based on dominant real-world model training practices. Leveraging these priors, our approach enables accurate mapping of previously undocumented areas of the atlas. We publicly release our datasets, code, and interactive atlas.
A Hybrid Architecture with Efficient Fine Tuning for Abstractive Patent Document Summarization
Jayatilleke, Nevidu, Weerasinghe, Ruvan
Automatic patent summarization approaches that help in the patent analysis and comprehension procedure are in high demand due to the colossal growth of innovations. The development of natural language processing (NLP), text mining, and deep learning has notably amplified the efficacy of text summarization models for abundant types of documents. Summarizing patent text remains a pertinent challenge due to the labyrinthine writing style of these documents, which includes technical and legal intricacies. Additionally, these patent document contents are considerably lengthier than archetypal documents, which intricates the process of extracting pertinent information for summarization. Embodying extractive and abstractive text summarization methodologies into a hybrid framework, this study proposes a system for efficiently creating abstractive summaries of patent records. The procedure involves leveraging the LexRank graph-based algorithm to retrieve the important sentences from input parent texts, then utilizing a Bidirectional Auto-Regressive Transformer (BART) model that has been fine-tuned using Low-Ranking Adaptation (LoRA) for producing text summaries. This is accompanied by methodical testing and evaluation strategies. Furthermore, the author employed certain meta-learning techniques to achieve Domain Generalization (DG) of the abstractive component across multiple patent fields.
Climate land use and other drivers impacts on island ecosystem services: a global review
Moustakas, Aristides, Zemah-Shamir, Shiri, Tase, Mirela, Zotos, Savvas, Demirel, Nazli, Zoumides, Christos, Christoforidi, Irene, Dindaroglu, Turgay, Albayrak, Tamer, Ayhan, Cigdem Kaptan, Fois, Mauro, Manolaki, Paraskevi, Sandor, Attila D., Sieber, Ina, Stamatiadou, Valentini, Tzirkalli, Elli, Vogiatzakis, Ioannis N., Zemah-Shamir, Ziv, Zittis, George
Islands are diversity hotspots and vulnerable to environmental degradation, climate variations, land use changes and societal crises. These factors can exhibit interactive impacts on ecosystem services. The study reviewed a large number of papers on the climate change-islands-ecosystem services topic worldwide. Potential inclusion of land use changes and other drivers of impacts on ecosystem services were sequentially also recorded. The study sought to investigate the impacts of climate change, land use change, and other non-climatic driver changes on island ecosystem services. Explanatory variables examined were divided into two categories: environmental variables and methodological ones. Environmental variables include sea zone geographic location, ecosystem, ecosystem services, climate, land use, other driver variables, Methodological variables include consideration of policy interventions, uncertainty assessment, cumulative effects of climate change, synergistic effects of climate change with land use change and other anthropogenic and environmental drivers, and the diversity of variables used in the analysis. Machine learning and statistical methods were used to analyze their effects on island ecosystem services. Negative climate change impacts on ecosystem services are better quantified by land use change or other non-climatic driver variables than by climate variables. The synergy of land use together with climate changes is modulating the impact outcome and critical for a better impact assessment. Analyzed together, there is little evidence of more pronounced for a specific sea zone, ecosystem, or ecosystem service. Climate change impacts may be underestimated due to the use of a single climate variable deployed in most studies. Policy interventions exhibit low classification accuracy in quantifying impacts indicating insufficient efficacy or integration in the studies.
The Algorithmic State Architecture (ASA): An Integrated Framework for AI-Enabled Government
Engin, Zeynep, Crowcroft, Jon, Hand, David, Treleaven, Philip
As artificial intelligence transforms public sector operations, governments struggle to integrate technological innovations into coherent systems for effective service delivery. This paper introduces the Algorithmic State Architecture (ASA), a novel four-layer framework conceptualising how Digital Public Infrastructure, Data-for-Policy, Algorithmic Government/Governance, and GovTech interact as an integrated system in AI-enabled states. Unlike approaches that treat these as parallel developments, ASA positions them as interdependent layers with specific enabling relationships and feedback mechanisms. Through comparative analysis of implementations in Estonia, Singapore, India, and the UK, we demonstrate how foundational digital infrastructure enables systematic data collection, which powers algorithmic decision-making processes, ultimately manifesting in user-facing services. Our analysis reveals that successful implementations require balanced development across all layers, with particular attention to integration mechanisms between them. The framework contributes to both theory and practice by bridging previously disconnected domains of digital government research, identifying critical dependencies that influence implementation success, and providing a structured approach for analysing the maturity and development pathways of AI-enabled government systems.
Is My Text in Your AI Model? Gradient-based Membership Inference Test applied to LLMs
Mancera, Gonzalo, DeAlcala, Daniel, Fierrez, Julian, Tolosana, Ruben, Morales, Aythami
This work adapts and studies the gradient-based Membership Inference Test (gMINT) to the classification of text based on LLMs. MINT is a general approach intended to determine if given data was used for training machine learning models, and this work focuses on its application to the domain of Natural Language Processing. Using gradient-based analysis, the MINT model identifies whether particular data samples were included during the language model training phase, addressing growing concerns about data privacy in machine learning. The method was evaluated in seven Transformer-based models and six datasets comprising over 2.5 million sentences, focusing on text classification tasks. Experimental results demonstrate MINTs robustness, achieving AUC scores between 85% and 99%, depending on data size and model architecture. These findings highlight MINTs potential as a scalable and reliable tool for auditing machine learning models, ensuring transparency, safeguarding sensitive data, and fostering ethical compliance in the deployment of AI/NLP technologies.
Computational Law: Datasets, Benchmarks, and Ontologies
There is a surge observed in research and applications of computer science and artificial intelligence in the legal domain. The related term computational law is commonly defined as "the branch of Legal Informatics concerned with the representation of rule and regulations in computable form" [Genesereth and Chaudhri, 2022]. The focus of an important percentage of related work on computational law is on automatic processing, generation, or understanding of legal documents [Küçük and Can, 2024]. Recent advancements in artificial intelligence (AI), such as generative AI models, pre-trained language models (PLMs) or large language models (LLMs), and chatbots developed using such models, have also affected the domain of computational law, and this dramatic impact is also acknowledged by legal professionals [Goth, 2024]. Undoubtedly, annotated or unannotated datasets and benchmarks in digital form are required for legal AI studies on legal texts, in order to facilitate model training, and to ensure sound comparisons of different approaches to the problems pertaining to computational law.
DataMan: Data Manager for Pre-training Large Language Models
Peng, Ru, Yang, Kexin, Zeng, Yawen, Lin, Junyang, Liu, Dayiheng, Zhao, Junbo
The performance emergence of large language models (LLMs) driven by data scaling laws makes the selection of pre-training data increasingly important. However, existing methods rely on limited heuristics and human intuition, lacking comprehensive and clear guidelines. To address this, we are inspired by ``reverse thinking'' -- prompting LLMs to self-identify which criteria benefit its performance. As its pre-training capabilities are related to perplexity (PPL), we derive 14 quality criteria from the causes of text perplexity anomalies and introduce 15 common application domains to support domain mixing. In this paper, we train a Data Manager (DataMan) to learn quality ratings and domain recognition from pointwise rating, and use it to annotate a 447B token pre-training corpus with 14 quality ratings and domain type. Our experiments validate our approach, using DataMan to select 30B tokens to train a 1.3B-parameter language model, demonstrating significant improvements in in-context learning (ICL), perplexity, and instruction-following ability over the state-of-the-art baseline. The best-performing model, based on the Overall Score l=5 surpasses a model trained with 50% more data using uniform sampling. We continue pre-training with high-rated, domain-specific data annotated by DataMan to enhance domain-specific ICL performance and thus verify DataMan's domain mixing ability. Our findings emphasize the importance of quality ranking, the complementary nature of quality criteria, and their low correlation with perplexity, analyzing misalignment between PPL and ICL performance. We also thoroughly analyzed our pre-training dataset, examining its composition, the distribution of quality ratings, and the original document sources.