HomeArtificial IntelligencearXiv:2605.29742

Citation-Closure Retrieval and Per-Rule Attribution for Real-World Regulatory Compliance Question Answering

Artificial Intelligence2026-05v1license

Abstract

Deploying Large Language Models (LLMs) for regulatory compliance demands rigorous traceability via comprehensive citations across multi-tiered authority structures. Unlike traditional multi-hop or legal QA, this task requires structured procedural lookups and evidence-set closure rather than entity resolution or case-law reasoning. Existing RAG systems struggle here due to flattened citation edges, fragmented retrieval expansions, and fragile post-hoc attribution. We formalize Regulatory Compliance QA with RegOps-Bench, a novel benchmark featuring an Operational Knowledge Graph derived from complex national R\&D regulations. To address these bottlenecks, we propose RefWalk, a unified framework driven by a shared topic anchor. RefWalk traverses cross-document citations, fuses multi-view candidates via max-based aggregation, and enforces per-rule attribution to explicitly map claims to sources. We establish a strong baseline with substantial improvements in retrieval recall and citation accuracy. Finally, a contrastive evaluation on a U.S. health compliance dataset (HIPAA) reveals that existing systems exhibit saturation on flat-structure rules, underscoring the need for RegOps-Bench. Our code is available at https://github.com/yeongjoonJu/RefWalk.

Comments: Under Review

Cite

@article{arxiv.2605.29742,
  title  = {Citation-Closure Retrieval and Per-Rule Attribution for Real-World Regulatory Compliance Question Answering},
  author = {Yeong-Joon Ju and Seong-Whan Lee},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.29742},
  year   = {2026}
}