Large Language Models (LLMs) could struggle to fully understand legal theories and perform complex legal reasoning tasks. In this study, we introduce a challenging task (confusing charge prediction) to better evaluate LLMs’ understanding of legal theories and reasoning capabilities. We also propose a novel framework: Multi-Agent framework for improving complex Legal Reasoning capability (MALR). MALR employs non-parametric learning, encouraging LLMs to automatically decompose complex legal tasks and mimic human learning process to extract insights from legal rules, helping LLMs better understand legal theories and enhance their legal reasoning abilities. Extensive experiments on multiple real-world datasets demonstrate that the proposed framework effectively addresses complex reasoning issues in practical scenarios, paving the way for more reliable applications in the legal domain.

Prompt tuning is a parameter-efficient method, which learns soft prompts and conditions frozen language models to perform specific downstream tasks. Though effective, prompt tuning under few-shot settings on the one hand heavily relies on a good initialization of soft prompts. On the other hand, it can easily overfit to few-shot training samples, thereby undermining generalizability. Existing works leverage pre-training or supervised meta-learning to initialize soft prompts but they fail to data-efficiently generalize to unseen downstream tasks. To address the above problems, this paper proposes a novel Self-sUpervised meta-Prompt learning framework with MEta-gradient Regularization for few-shot generalization (SUPMER). SUPMER leverages self-supervised meta-learning with a diverse set of well-designed meta-tasks to learn a universal prompt initialization for efficient adaptation using only unlabeled data. Additionally, it jointly meta-learns a gradient regularization function to transform raw gradients into a domain-generalizable direction, thus alleviating the problem of overfitting. Extensive experiments show that SUPMER achieves better performance for different few-shot downstream tasks, and also exhibits a stronger domain generalization ability. The code for SUPMER will be available at https://github.com/beepkh/SUPMER.

Visual Relation Extraction (VRE) is a powerful means of discovering relationships between entities within visually-rich documents. Existing methods often focus on manipulating entity features to find pairwise relations, yet neglect the more fundamental structural information that links disparate entity pairs together. The absence of global structure information may make the model struggle to learn long-range relations and easily predict conflicted results. To alleviate such limitations, we propose a GlObal Structure knowledge-guided relation Extraction (GOSE) framework. GOSE initiates by generating preliminary relation predictions on entity pairs extracted from a scanned image of the document. Subsequently, global structural knowledge is captured from the preceding iterative predictions, which are then incorporated into the representations of the entities. This “generate-capture-incorporate” cycle is repeated multiple times, allowing entity representations and global structure knowledge to be mutually reinforced. Extensive experiments validate that GOSE not only outperforms existing methods in the standard fine-tuning setting but also reveals superior cross-lingual learning capabilities; indeed, even yields stronger data-efficient performance in the low-resource setting.

Customers ask questions and customer service staffs answer their questions, which is the basic service model via multi-turn customer service (CS) dialogues on E-commerce platforms. Existing studies fail to provide comprehensive service satisfaction analysis, namely satisfaction polarity classification (e.g., well satisfied, met and unsatisfied) and sentimental utterance identification (e.g., positive, neutral and negative). In this paper, we conduct a pilot study on the task of service satisfaction analysis (SSA) based on multi-turn CS dialogues. We propose an extensible Context-Assisted Multiple Instance Learning (CAMIL) model to predict the sentiments of all the customer utterances and then aggregate those sentiments into service satisfaction polarity. After that, we propose a novel Context Clue Matching Mechanism (CCMM) to enhance the representations of all customer utterances with their matched context clues, i.e., sentiment and reasoning clues. We construct two CS dialogue datasets from a top E-commerce platform. Extensive experimental results are presented and contrasted against a few previous models to demonstrate the efficacy of our model.