Ya Zhang
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2026
Multi-Source Retrieval and Reasoning for Legal Sentencing Prediction
Junjie Chen | Haitao Li | Qilei Zhang | Zhenghua Li | Ya Zhang | Quan Zhou | Cheng Luo | Yiqun Liu | Min Zhang | Yueyue Wu | Dongsheng Guo | Qingyao Ai
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Junjie Chen | Haitao Li | Qilei Zhang | Zhenghua Li | Ya Zhang | Quan Zhou | Cheng Luo | Yiqun Liu | Min Zhang | Yueyue Wu | Dongsheng Guo | Qingyao Ai
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Legal judgment prediction (LJP) aims to predict judicial outcomes from case facts and typically includes law article, charge, and sentencing prediction. While recent methods perform well on the first two subtasks, legal sentencing prediction (LSP) remains difficult due to its need for fine-grained objective knowledge and flexible subjective reasoning. To address these limitations, we propose MSR2, a framework that integrates multi-source retrieval and reasoning in LLMs with reinforcement learning. MSR2 enables LLMs to perform multi-source retrieval based on reasoning needs and applies a process-level reward to guide intermediate subjective reasoning steps. Experiments on two real-world datasets show that MSR2 improves both accuracy and interpretability in LSP, providing a promising step toward practical legal AI. Our code is available at https://github.com/cjj826/MSR2.