Asking For An Old Friend: Diagnosing and Mitigating Temporal Failure Modes in LLM-based Statutory Question Answering

arXiv:2605.23497 · cs.CL · Submitted 2026-05-22 · Read on arXiv

cs.CL

Submitted: 2026-05-22

Updated: 2026-09-25

Code: https://github.com/TUMLegalTech/temporal_bias

Terminology

• RAG — 52× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Failure Modes — 12× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Generalization — 10× in this paper · explained in 13 episodes
• Benchmark — 7× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Legal Basis — 7× in this paper
• LLM-as-a-Judge — 6× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• LLM judge — 4× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Robustness — 4× in this paper · explained in 5 episodes
• Accuracy — 3× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Generative AI — 3× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Abstention — 2× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Embeddings — 2× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Grounding — 2× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Retrieval-Augmented Generation — 2× in this paper
• Ablation — 1× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Abstention mechanism — 1× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Adam — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Adaptability — 1× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Adaptation — 1× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Alignment — 1× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Benchmarking — 1× in this paper · explained in 4 episodes
• Catastrophic Forgetting — 1× in this paper · explained in 5 episodes
• Consistency — 1× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Core — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Correct Outcome — 1× in this paper
• Cosine Similarity — 1× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Generalizability — 1× in this paper · explained in 6 episodes
• Large Language Models (LLMs) — 1× in this paper · explained in 6 episodes
• Mixture of Experts — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Perplexity — 1× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Refusal Count — 1× in this paper
• Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) — 1× in this paper · explained in 16 episodes
• Temporal Reasoning — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes

Sources

• LEXam: Benchmarking Legal Reasoning on 340 Law Exams
• AI for Scaling Legal Reform: Mapping and Redacting Racial Covenants in Santa Clara County
• Do LLMs Truly Understand When a Precedent Is Overruled?
• Judging LLM-as-a-Judge with MT-Bench and Chatbot Arena

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