Intended use
AutoCite identifies mechanical citation issues, proposes supported corrections, and abstains when required citation facts are missing. It is designed to run behind AutoCite's deterministic validator, which remains responsible for rejecting span mismatches, unsupported facts, prohibited legal claims, and unsafe automatic edits.
The model is not a substitute for source verification or professional legal review. It does not determine good-law status, controlling authority, precedential weight, or proposition support.
Training
- Base model: Qwen/Qwen3.5-0.8B
- Method: supervised fine-tuning with PEFT LoRA
- LoRA rank/alpha: 16/32
- Epochs: 3
- Training examples: 502
- Validation examples: 54
- Modes: Bluepages and Whitepages
- Data: synthetic or original citation transformations and conservative abstention cases
- Final validation loss: 0.00005176
- Final validation token accuracy: 1.0
The training corpus covers mechanical normalization for federal statutes, regulations, reporters, and short forms, plus incomplete case, internet, journal, and book citations that require abstention. These metrics measure performance on the templated held-out validation split and should not be interpreted as comprehensive Bluebook accuracy.
Loading
import torch
from peft import PeftModel
from transformers import AutoModelForImageTextToText, AutoProcessor
base_id = "Qwen/Qwen3.5-0.8B"
adapter_id = "foolish-bandit/AutoCite-0.8B"
processor = AutoProcessor.from_pretrained(adapter_id)
base = AutoModelForImageTextToText.from_pretrained(
base_id, dtype=torch.float16, device_map="auto"
)
model = PeftModel.from_pretrained(base, adapter_id)
For the complete safety-gated MCP and CLI workflow, use the AutoCite repository: https://github.com/zgbrenner/autocite
Verified smoke tests
The published adapter was loaded from the Hub and correctly:
- normalized 42 USC §1983 to 42 U.S.C. § 1983;
- normalized 17 CFR §240.10b-5 to 17 C.F.R. § 240.10b-5; and
- abstained from completing Smith v. Jones because reporter, court, and year facts were absent.
Limitations
The initial release focuses on English-language U.S. legal citations. The training data is deliberately small and structured. Real legal documents contain additional citation families, typography, local rules, malformed spans, and ambiguous context that require broader evaluation. Automatic application should remain disabled unless a proposal passes deterministic validation.