CaseLaw: A Policy-Decoupled Framework for Training-Free Content Moderation

arXiv:2611.11812v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Content moderation is inherently policy-dependent: moderation boundaries are often subtle, subjective, and frequently updated, while conventional rule based or fine-tuning based systems require costly rule rewriting, model retraining, or system redeployment. We propose CaseLaw, a policy-decoupled and training-free framework for adaptive content moderation. CaseLaw reformulates moderation as precedent-based retrieval and voting, where multimodal content is transformed into evidence-preserved structured semantics, embedded into a stable semantic space, and classified by thresholded voting over retrieved precedent labels. We train NoteCap on a large-scale corpus of structurally annotated notes to ensure consistent semantic extraction and freeze it during subsequent policy adaptation, which requires no additional training. Policy adaptation is achieved by updating the semantic case library, including case labels and mappings, without retraining models or modifying prompts. To evaluate CaseLaw, we construct MFO-RedNotes, a benchmark for the male-female opposition risk domain. We additionally provide a five category CoPro comparison. Experiments show that CaseLaw consistently outperforms competing baselines in both precision and recall across policy-dependent risk levels and broader safety categories, with category-wise precision/recall reaching up to 86.8%/90.1% on MFO-RedNotes across both policy settings and 94.5%/92.3% on CoPro. Our work highlights the potential of precedent-based reasoning for policy adaptive content moderation and offers a practical direction toward more stable, transparent, and training-free moderation systems.