Cited but Not Consulted: A Counterfactual Audit of Legal Chain-of-Thought Faithfulness

arXiv:2610.12361 · cs.AI, cs.CL, cs.CY · Submitted 2026-10-08 · Read on arXiv

cs.AI, cs.CL, cs.CY

Submitted: 2026-10-08

Updated: 2026-10-08

Terminology

• Accuracy — 18× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Ablation — 11× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Benchmark — 8× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Robustness — 8× in this paper · explained in 5 episodes
• Calibration — 6× in this paper · explained in 7 episodes
• Adaptation — 2× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Hallucination — 2× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• LoRA Adapters — 2× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Reinforcement Learning — 2× in this paper · explained in 4 episodes
• Adam — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Adversarial Robustness — 1× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Benchmarking — 1× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Chain-of-Thought (CoT) — 1× in this paper · explained in 4 episodes
• Chain-of-Thought (CoT) Reasoning — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Chain-of-Thought Prompting — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Core — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Decode — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Grounding — 1× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Hallucination Detection — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Information Gain — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Instruction Tuning — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Interpretability — 1× in this paper · explained in 15 episodes
• Reasoning Traces — 1× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Self-Supervised Learning — 1× in this paper · explained in 7 episodes
• Trace — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Transformer — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Verification — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes

Sources

• Eliciting Latent Predictions from Transformers with the Tuned Lens
• LegalCiteBench: Evaluating Citation Reliability in Legal Language Models
• Legal$\Delta$: Enhancing Legal Reasoning in LLMs via Reinforcement Learning with Chain-of-Thought Guided Information Gain
• Measuring Faithfulness in Chain-of-Thought Reasoning
• Who Checks the Citations? Benchmarking Legal Hallucination Detection
• When Agents Commit Too Soon: Diagnosing Premature Commitment in LLM Agents
• Citation Grounding Measures the Oracle: Graph Coverage Determines Reported LLM Hallucination Rates in Law
• Beyond the Commitment Boundary: Probing Epiphenomenal Chain-of-Thought in Large Reasoning Models
• Breaking the Chain: A Causal Analysis of LLM Faithfulness to Intermediate Structures
• Know Your Limits : On the Faithfulness of LLMs as Solvers and Autoformalizers in Legal Reasoning
• When Does a Language Model Commit? A Finite-Answer Theory of Pre-Verbalization Commitment

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