Legal case retrieval remains challenging due to the complexity of legal language and the need for precise lexical alignment between queries and relevant cases. Although dense retrieval models have achieved notable progress, empirical studies show that BM25 continues to serve as a strong baseline in this domain. It motivates us to propose a self-evolving framework for rule-driven query rewriting that enhances BM25 without any parameter training. The framework equips an LLM-based agent with an automatic evaluation environment, enabling it to iteratively create rewriting rules, plan validation experiments over rule combinations, and eliminate ineffective rules based on historical feedbacks. We evaluate our method on the Chinese legal case retrieval benchmark LeCaRD-v2. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed framework outperforms non-evolutionary baselines, including human-designed rules and greedy rule selection, particularly when powered by a high-capacity core LLM. We also conduct detailed analyses to investigate the mechanisms underlying self-evolution. Our findings reveal that LLM’s capabilities to leverage previous experimental results and its intrinsic knowledge of rule elimination play critical roles in refining the rule set via self-evolution.

Although neural machine translation with the encoder-decoder framework has achieved great success recently, it still suffers drawbacks of forgetting distant information, which is an inherent disadvantage of recurrent neural network structure, and disregarding relationship between source words during encoding step. Whereas in practice, the former information and relationship are often useful in current step. We target on solving these problems and thus introduce relation networks to learn better representations of the source. The relation networks are able to facilitate memorization capability of recurrent neural network via associating source words with each other, this would also help retain their relationships. Then the source representations and all the relations are fed into the attention component together while decoding, with the main encoder-decoder framework unchanged. Experiments on several datasets show that our method can improve the translation performance significantly over the conventional encoder-decoder model and even outperform the approach involving supervised syntactic knowledge.