GLIER: Generative Legal Inference and Evidence Ranking for Legal Case Retrieval

The semantic gap between colloquial user queries and professional legal documents presents a fundamental challenge in Legal Case Retrieval (LCR). Existing dense retrieval methods typically treat LCR as a black-box semantic matching process, neglecting the explicit juridical logic that underpins legal relevance. To address this, we propose GLIER (Generative Legal Inference and Evidence Ranking), a framework that reformulates retrieval as an inference process over latent legal variables. GLIER decomposes the task into two interpretability-driven stages: (1) A Joint Generative Inference module that translates raw queries into latent legal indicators (Charges and Legal Elements), employing a unified sequenceto-sequence strategy where charges and elements are generated jointly to enforce logical consistency; and (2) A Multi-View Evidence Fusion mechanism that aggregates generative confidence with structural and lexical signals for precise ranking. Extensive experiments on LeCaRD and LeCaRDv2 demonstrate that GLIER outperforms strong baselines like SAILER and KELLER. Notably, our framework exhibits exceptional data efficiency, maintaining robust performance even when trained with only 10% of the data. * Equal contribution. † Corresponding author. (Query)On November 17, 2016, at 9 PM... due to a dispute over someone else's matter, he had an argument with Shao Huapeng over the phone. Shao Huapeng arranged to fight him at Zhaoh Bridge, but he did not go to the agreed location. Shao Huapeng then gathered several people and went to the "Shengli Restaurant" in Tianqiao Town... Shao Huapeng, Shao Hualai, Zhao 1, and others, armed with machetes, steel pipes, spears, and other tools, entered the Shengli Restaurant in Tianqiao Town first. The defendant Shao Yingzhu followed them in. Shao Huapeng, Shao Hualai, Zhao 1, and others smashed the counters and refrigerators in the restaurant and injured the victims Zhao 3 and Zhao 2, who were dining in the restaurant, before fleeing the scene. ...Tian Tengfei stated that more than a dozen people vandalized his "Shengli Restaurant" and injured two customers who were dining there... According to the forensic examination, the injuries sustained by victims Zhao 3 and Zhao 2 were both classified as minor injuries... Legal elements:"Joint intentional act | Armed brawl | Multiple participants | Disruption of public order | Causing minor injuries" Charge: Crime of Affray