A practical artificial intelligence framework for legal age estimation using clavicle computed tomography scans

Legal age estimation plays a critical role in forensic and medico-legal contexts, where decisions must be supported by accurate, robust, and reproducible methods with explicit uncertainty quantification. While prior artificial intelligence (AI)-based approaches have primarily focused on hand radiographs or dental imaging, clavicle computed tomography (CT) scans remain underexplored despite their documented effectiveness for legal age estimation. In this work, we present an interpretable, multi-stage pipeline for legal age estimation from clavicle CT scans. The proposed framework combines (i) a feature-based connected-component method for automatic clavicle detection that requires minimal manual annotation, (ii) an Integrated Gradients-guided slice selection strategy used to construct the input data for a multi-slice convolutional neural network that estimates legal age, and (iii) conformal prediction intervals to support uncertainty-aware decisions in accordance with established international protocols. The pipeline is evaluated on 1,158 full-body post-mortem CT scans from a public forensic dataset (the New Mexico Decedent Image Database). The final model achieves state-of-the-art performance with a mean absolute error (MAE) of 1.55 $\pm$ 0.16 years on a held-out test set, outperforming both human experts (MAE of approximately 1.90 years) and previous methods (MAEs above 1.75 years in our same dataset). Furthermore, conformal prediction enables configurable coverage levels aligned with forensic requirements. Attribution maps indicate that the model focuses on anatomically relevant regions of the medial clavicular epiphysis. The proposed method, which is currently being added as part of the Skeleton-ID software (https://skeleton-id.com/skeleton-id/), is intended as a decision-support component within multi-factorial forensic workflows.

Legal-DC: Benchmarking Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Legal Documents

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has emerged as a promising technology for legal document consultation, yet its application in Chinese legal scenarios faces two key limitations: existing benchmarks lack specialized support for joint retriever-generator evaluation, and mainstream RAG systems often fail to accommodate the structured nature of legal provisions. To address these gaps, this study advances two core contributions: First, we constructed the Legal-DC benchmark dataset, comprising 480 legal documents (covering areas such as market regulation and contract management) and 2,475 refined question-answer pairs, each annotated with clause-level references, filling the gap for specialized evaluation resources in Chinese legal RAG. Second, we propose the LegRAG framework, which integrates legal adaptive indexing (clause-boundary segmentation) with a dual-path self-reflection mechanism to ensure clause integrity while enhancing answer accuracy. Third, we introduce automated evaluation methods for large language models to meet the high-reliability demands of legal retrieval scenarios. LegRAG outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods by 1.3% to 5.6% across key evaluation metrics. This research provides a specialized benchmark, practical framework, and empirical insights to advance the development of Chinese legal RAG systems. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/legal-dc/Legal-DC.

OrgForge: A Multi-Agent Simulation Framework for Verifiable Synthetic Corporate Corpora

Evaluating retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines requires corpora where ground truth is knowable, temporally structured, and cross-artifact properties that real-world datasets rarely provide cleanly. Existing resources such as the Enron corpus carry legal ambiguity, demographic skew, and no structured ground truth. Purely LLM-generated synthetic data solves the legal problem but introduces a subtler one: the generating model cannot be prevented from hallucinating facts that contradict themselves across documents.We present OrgForge, an open-source multi-agent simulation framework that enforces a strict physics-cognition boundary: a deterministic Python engine maintains a SimEvent ground truth bus; large language models generate only surface prose, constrained by validated proposals. An actor-local clock enforces causal timestamp correctness across all artifact types, eliminating the class of timeline inconsistencies that arise when timestamps are sampled independently per document. We formalize three graph-dynamic subsystems stress propagation via betweenness centrality, temporal edge-weight decay, and Dijkstra escalation routing that govern organizational behavior independently of any LLM. Running a configurable N-day simulation, OrgForge produces interleaved Slack threads, JIRA tickets, Confluence pages, Git pull requests, and emails, all traceable to a shared, immutable event log. We additionally describe a causal chain tracking subsystem that accumulates cross-artifact evidence graphs per incident, a hybrid reciprocal-rank-fusion recurrence detector for identifying repeated failure classes, and an inbound/outbound email engine that routes vendor alerts, customer complaints, and HR correspondence through gated causal chains with probabilistic drop simulation. OrgForge is available under the MIT license.

ESG-Bench: Benchmarking Long-Context ESG Reports for Hallucination Mitigation

As corporate responsibility increasingly incorporates environmental, social, and governance (ESG) criteria, ESG reporting is becoming a legal requirement in many regions and a key channel for documenting sustainability practices and assessing firms' long-term and ethical performance. However, the length and complexity of ESG disclosures make them difficult to interpret and automate the analysis reliably. To support scalable and trustworthy analysis, this paper introduces ESG-Bench, a benchmark dataset for ESG report understanding and hallucination mitigation in large language models (LLMs). ESG-Bench contains human-annotated question-answer (QA) pairs grounded in real-world ESG report contexts, with fine-grained labels indicating whether model outputs are factually supported or hallucinated. Framing ESG report analysis as a QA task with verifiability constraints enables systematic evaluation of LLMs' ability to extract and reason over ESG content and provides a new use case: mitigating hallucinations in socially sensitive, compliance-critical settings. We design task-specific Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting strategies and fine-tune multiple state-of-the-art LLMs on ESG-Bench using CoT-annotated rationales. Our experiments show that these CoT-based methods substantially outperform standard prompting and direct fine-tuning in reducing hallucinations, and that the gains transfer to existing QA benchmarks beyond the ESG domain.

SinhaLegal: A Benchmark Corpus for Information Extraction and Analysis in Sinhala Legislative Texts

SinhaLegal introduces a Sinhala legislative text corpus containing approximately 2 million words across 1,206 legal documents. The dataset includes two types of legal documents: 1,065 Acts dated from 1981 to 2014 and 141 Bills from 2010 to 2014, which were systematically collected from official sources. The texts were extracted using OCR with Google Document AI, followed by extensive post-processing and manual cleaning to ensure high-quality, machine-readable content, along with dedicated metadata files for each document. A comprehensive evaluation was conducted, including corpus statistics, lexical diversity, word frequency analysis, named entity recognition, and topic modelling, demonstrating the structured and domain-specific nature of the corpus. Additionally, perplexity analysis using both large and small language models was performed to assess how effectively language models respond to domain-specific texts. The SinhaLegal corpus represents a vital resource designed to support NLP tasks such as summarisation, information extraction, and analysis, thereby bridging a critical gap in Sinhala legal research.

Structured Linked Data as a Memory Layer for Agent-Orchestrated Retrieval

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems typically treat documents as flat text, ignoring the structured metadata and linked relationships that knowledge graphs provide. In this paper, we investigate whether structured linked data, specifically Schema.org markup and dereferenceable entity pages served by a Linked Data Platform, can improve retrieval accuracy and answer quality in both standard and agentic RAG systems. We conduct a controlled experiment across four domains (editorial, legal, travel, e-commerce) using Vertex AI Vector Search 2.0 for retrieval and the Google Agent Development Kit (ADK) for agentic reasoning. Our experimental design tests seven conditions: three document representations (plain HTML, HTML with JSON-LD, and an enhanced agentic-optimized entity page) crossed with two retrieval modes (standard RAG and agentic RAG with multi-hop link traversal), plus an Enhanced+ condition that adds rich navigational affordances and entity interlinking. Our results reveal that while JSON-LD markup alone provides only modest improvements, our enhanced entity page format, incorporating llms.txt-style agent instructions, breadcrumbs, and neural search capabilities, achieves substantial gains: +29.6% accuracy improvement for standard RAG and +29.8% for the full agentic pipeline. The Enhanced+ variant, with richer navigational affordances, achieves the highest absolute scores (accuracy: 4.85/5, completeness: 4.55/5), though the incremental gain over the base enhanced format is not statistically significant. We release our dataset, evaluation framework, and enhanced entity page templates to support reproducibility.

Coupling Local Context and Global Semantic Prototypes via a Hierarchical Architecture for Rhetorical Roles Labeling

Rhetorical Role Labeling (RRL) identifies the functional role of each sentence in a document, a key task for discourse understanding in domains such as law and medicine. While hierarchical models capture local dependencies effectively, they are limited in modeling global, corpus-level features. To address this limitation, we propose two prototype-based methods that integrate local context with global representations. Prototype-Based Regularization (PBR) learns soft prototypes through a distance-based auxiliary loss to structure the latent space, while Prototype-Conditioned Modulation (PCM) constructs corpus-level prototypes and injects them during training and inference. Given the scarcity of RRL resources, we introduce SCOTUS-Law, the first dataset of U.S. Supreme Court opinions annotated with rhetorical roles at three levels of granularity: category, rhetorical function, and step. Experiments on legal, medical, and scientific benchmarks show consistent improvements over strong baselines, with 4 Macro-F1 gains on low-frequency roles. We further analyze the implications in the era of Large Language Models and complement our findings with expert evaluation.

LexChronos: An Agentic Framework for Structured Event Timeline Extraction in Indian Jurisprudence

Understanding and predicting judicial outcomes demands nuanced analysis of legal documents. Traditional approaches treat judgments and proceedings as unstructured text, limiting the effectiveness of large language models (LLMs) in tasks such as summarization, argument generation, and judgment prediction. We propose LexChronos, an agentic framework that iteratively extracts structured event timelines from Supreme Court of India judgments. LexChronos employs a dual-agent architecture: a LoRA-instruct-tuned extraction agent identifies candidate events, while a pre-trained feedback agent scores and refines them through a confidence-driven loop. To address the scarcity of Indian legal event datasets, we construct a synthetic corpus of 2000 samples using reverse-engineering techniques with DeepSeek-R1 and GPT-4, generating gold-standard event annotations. Our pipeline achieves a BERT-based F1 score of 0.8751 against this synthetic ground truth. In downstream evaluations on legal text summarization, GPT-4 preferred structured timelines over unstructured baselines in 75% of cases, demonstrating improved comprehension and reasoning in Indian jurisprudence. This work lays a foundation for future legal AI applications in the Indian context, such as precedent mapping, argument synthesis, and predictive judgment modelling, by harnessing structured representations of legal events.

DocSplit: A Comprehensive Benchmark Dataset and Evaluation Approach for Document Packet Recognition and Splitting

Document understanding in real-world applications often requires processing heterogeneous, multi-page document packets containing multiple documents stitched together. Despite recent advances in visual document understanding, the fundamental task of document packet splitting, which involves separating a document packet into individual units, remains largely unaddressed. We present the first comprehensive benchmark dataset, DocSplit, along with novel evaluation metrics for assessing the document packet splitting capabilities of large language models. DocSplit comprises five datasets of varying complexity, covering diverse document types, layouts, and multimodal settings. We formalize the DocSplit task, which requires models to identify document boundaries, classify document types, and maintain correct page ordering within a document packet. The benchmark addresses real-world challenges, including out-of-order pages, interleaved documents, and documents lacking clear demarcations. We conduct extensive experiments evaluating multimodal LLMs on our datasets, revealing significant performance gaps in current models' ability to handle complex document splitting tasks. The DocSplit benchmark datasets and proposed novel evaluation metrics provide a systematic framework for advancing document understanding capabilities essential for legal, financial, healthcare, and other document-intensive domains. We release the datasets to facilitate future research in document packet processing.

What hackers talk about when they talk about AI: Early-stage diffusion of a cybercrime innovation

The rapid expansion of artificial intelligence (AI) is raising concerns about its potential to transform cybercrime. Beyond empowering novice offenders, AI stands to intensify the scale and sophistication of attacks by seasoned cybercriminals. This paper examines the evolving relationship between cybercriminals and AI using a unique dataset from a cyber threat intelligence platform. Analyzing more than 160 cybercrime forum conversations collected over seven months, our research reveals how cybercriminals understand AI and discuss how they can exploit its capabilities. Their exchanges reflect growing curiosity about AI's criminal applications through legal tools and dedicated criminal tools, but also doubts and anxieties about AI's effectiveness and its effects on their business models and operational security. The study documents attempts to misuse legitimate AI tools and develop bespoke models tailored for illicit purposes. Combining the diffusion of innovation framework with thematic analysis, the paper provides an in-depth view of emerging AI-enabled cybercrime and offers practical insights for law enforcement and policymakers.