MAP-Law: Coverage-Driven Retrieval Control for Multi-Turn Legal Consultation

Abstract

Legal consultation is a high-stakes, knowledge-intensive task that requires agents to identify relevant legal issues, retrieve authoritative support, and determine when evidence is sufficient for a recommendation. Although retrieval-augmented generation has improved grounding in legal question answering, many multi-turn legal agents still rely on fixed retrieval depth or coarse heuristic control. This often leads to either insufficient support for key legal elements or excessive retrieval that increases context burden and weakens answer focus. We propose MAP-Law, a coverage-driven framework for retrieval control in multi-turn legal consultation. MAP-Law models consultation as a controlled retrieval process over a joint structured state consisting of issue nodes, legal element nodes, and evidence nodes. After each retrieval round, the agent computes Element Coverage, Evidence Coverage, and Marginal Gain, and uses these signals to decide whether to continue retrieval, redirect the search, or generate the final response. In this way, MAP-Law turns stopping from a fixed hyperparameter into an interpretable and auditable decision aligned with legal argumentative structure. Experiments on a self-constructed dataset of 50 cases across eight labor-law scenarios show that MAP-Law with DeepSeek as the action selector achieves an Element Coverage of 0.860 using only 2.9 retrieval rounds and 5.8 evidence pieces on average. Compared with a fixed seven-round baseline, it reduces evidence volume by over 80% and retrieval rounds by 58%. Ablation results further confirm the independent contributions of coverage-driven stopping, joint graph representation, and LLM-based action selection.