用细粒度检索与推理,让大模型判断专利创新点是否真实存在。
Is It Novel and Why? Fine-Grained Patent Novelty Prediction Based on Passage Retrieval

- 将专利新颖性判断从整体分类转为特征级检索与推理。
- 在3658个专利特征上验证,大模型比传统方法更准且抗干扰。
- 适合需要透明、可解释专利审查的科研与法律从业者。
新颖性评估是专利审查中的关键但复杂任务,需判断发明是否已被现有技术披露。传统方法通常将新颖性预测视为声明级别的二分类问题,但该方式易受虚假相关性影响,缺乏实际应用所需的细粒度。本文提出FiNE-Patents数据集,包含3,658条首件专利声明,其细粒度特征级现有技术引用来自欧洲检索意见(ESOP)文档。我们主张将评估范式从简单二分类转向特征级别的联合检索与抽象推理任务:要求模型从现有技术文档中识别出披露具体声明特征的段落,并指出哪些特征使声明具有新颖性。我们构建并评估了基于大模型的工作流,将声明分解为特征,逐项分析与现有技术的关系,最终生成声明级新颖性判断。实验表明,这些工作流在段落检索和新特征识别上优于基于嵌入的基线模型。此外,我们发现大模型对声明级新颖性分类任务中的虚假相关性具有更强鲁棒性。我们已公开数据集与代码,以推动透明、细粒度专利分析研究。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Novelty assessment is a critical yet complex task in the examination process for patent acceptance, requiring examiners to determine whether an invention is disclosed in a prior art document. The process involves intricate matching between specific features of a patent claim and passages in the prior art. While prior work has approached novelty prediction primarily as a binary classification task at the claim level, we argue that this formulation is susceptible to spurious correlations and lacks the granularity required for practical application. In this work, we introduce FiNE-Patents (Fine-grained Novelty Examination of Patents), a novel dataset comprising 3,658 first patent claims annotated with fine-grained, feature-level prior art references extracted from European Search Opinion (ESOP) documents. We propose shifting the evaluation paradigm from simple binary classification to a joint retrieval and abstract reasoning task at the feature level, requiring models to identify specific passages from a prior art document that disclose individual claim features, and to identify which features of a claim make it novel. We implement and evaluate LLM-based workflows that decompose claims into features, analyze each feature against prior art, and finally derive a claim-level novelty prediction. Our experiments demonstrate that these workflows outperform embedding-based baselines on passage retrieval and novel feature identification. Furthermore, we show that unlike trained classifiers, LLMs are robust against spurious correlations present in the claim-level novelty classification task. We release the dataset and code to foster further research into transparent and granular patent analysis.
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