Our dataset includes half a million design patents comprising 3.61 million figures along with captions from patents granted by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) over a 16-year period from 2007 to 2022. We incorporate the metadata of each patent application with elaborate captions that are coherent with multiple viewpoints of designs.

Our dataset includes half a million design patents comprising 3.61 million figures along with captions from patents granted by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) over a 16-year period from 2007 to 2022. We incorporate the metadata of each patent application with elaborate captions that are coherent with multiple viewpoints of designs.

Hierarchical text classification (HTC) assigns documents to multiple levels of a pre-defined taxonomy. Automated patent subject classification represents one of the hardest HTC scenarios because of domain knowledge difficulty and a huge number of labels. Prior approaches only output a flat label set, which offers little insight into the reason behind predictions. Therefore, we propose Reasoning for Hierarchical Classification (RHC), a novel framework that reformulates HTC as a step-by-step reasoning task to sequentially deduce hierarchical labels. RHC trains large language models (LLMs) in two stages: a cold-start stage that aligns outputs with chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning format and a reinforcement learning (RL) stage to enhance multi-step reasoning ability. RHC demonstrates four advantages in our experiments. (1) Effectiveness: RHC surpasses previous baselines and outperforms the supervised fine-tuning counterparts by approximately 3% in accuracy and macro F1. (2) Explainability: RHC produces natural-language justifications before prediction to facilitate human inspection. (3) Scalability: RHC scales favorably with model size with larger gains compared to standard fine-tuning. (4) Applicability: Beyond patents, we further demonstrate that RHC achieves state-of-the-art performance on other widely used HTC benchmarks, which highlights its broad applicability.

In the field of design patent analysis, traditional tasks such as patent classification and patent image retrieval heavily depend on the image data. However, patent images -- typically consisting of sketches with abstract and structural elements of an invention -- often fall short in conveying comprehensive visual context and semantic information. This inadequacy can lead to ambiguities in evaluation during prior art searches. Recent advancements in vision-language models, such as CLIP, offer promising opportunities for more reliable and accurate AI-driven patent analysis. In this work, we leverage CLIP models to develop a unified framework DesignCLIP for design patent applications with a large-scale dataset of U.S. design patents. To address the unique characteristics of patent data, DesignCLIP incorporates class-aware classification and contrastive learning, utilizing generated detailed captions for patent images and multi-views image learning. We validate the effectiveness of DesignCLIP across various downstream tasks, including patent classification and patent retrieval. Additionally, we explore multimodal patent retrieval, which provides the potential to enhance creativity and innovation in design by offering more diverse sources of inspiration. Our experiments show that DesignCLIP consistently outperforms baseline and SOTA models in the patent domain on all tasks. Our findings underscore the promise of multimodal approaches in advancing patent analysis. The codebase is available here: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/PATENTCLIP-4661/README.md.

Large language models (LLMs) have emerged as transformative approaches in several important fields. This paper aims for a paradigm shift for patent writing by leveraging LLMs to overcome the tedious patent-filing process. In this work, we present PATENTWRITER, the first unified benchmarking framework for evaluating LLMs in patent abstract generation. Given the first claim of a patent, we evaluate six leading LLMs -- including GPT-4 and LLaMA-3 -- under a consistent setup spanning zero-shot, few-shot, and chain-of-thought prompting strategies to generate the abstract of the patent. Our benchmark PATENTWRITER goes beyond surface-level evaluation: we systematically assess the output quality using a comprehensive suite of metrics -- standard NLP measures (e.g., BLEU, ROUGE, BERTScore), robustness under three types of input perturbations, and applicability in two downstream patent classification and retrieval tasks. We also conduct stylistic analysis to assess length, readability, and tone. Experimental results show that modern LLMs can generate high-fidelity and stylistically appropriate patent abstracts, often surpassing domain-specific baselines. Our code and dataset are open-sourced to support reproducibility and future research.

In its simplest form, patent landscaping is the process of identifying all patents that are related to a particular technology or technology area. Patent landscapes are useful for a number of activities: it is important for assessing the coverage, value, or context of particular pieces of intellectual property, or for understanding the direction, speed, or concentration of innovation in a particular industry Hunt et al. [2007]. For example, companies create patent landscapes to evaluate the risks posed by competitors in a particular technology space, or to decide whether and how much to invest in pursuing particular innovations. Patent offices and economic monitoring organizations use patent landscapes to evaluate how a particular technology is affecting or might affect the economy, for example, how much economic investment is underway in a technology, how much economic value has been generated, or how many industries or companies are supported by a particular technology. Governments, in turn, can use that information to implement technology policies, for example, deciding whether to steer investment or tax incentives to companies working in particular areas (e.g., AI or green technologies). While the simplest form of patent landscaping merely identifies which patents are related to a particular area, other more sophisticated forms of patent landscaping can seek to identify how different subareas of a technology area are related, which companies or inventor groups are the most prolific, what regions are involved, or what specific types of innovations are the focus of current development.

Recent advancements in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning have demonstrated transformative capabilities across diverse domains. This progress extends to the field of patent analysis and innovation, where AI-based tools present opportunities to streamline and enhance important tasks in the patent cycle such as classification, retrieval, and valuation prediction. This not only accelerates the efficiency of patent researchers and applicants but also opens new avenues for technological innovation and discovery. Our survey provides a comprehensive summary of recent AI tools in patent analysis from more than 40 papers from 26 venues between 2017 and 2023. Unlike existing surveys, we include methods that work for patent image and text data. Furthermore, we introduce a novel taxonomy for the categorization based on the tasks in the patent life cycle as well as the specifics of the AI methods. This interdisciplinary survey aims to serve as a resource for researchers and practitioners who are working at the intersection of AI and patent analysis as well as the patent offices that are aiming to build efficient patent systems.

Advanced language-processing and machine-learning techniques promise massive efficiency improvements in the previously widely manual field of patent and technical knowledge management. This field presents large-scale and complex data with very precise contents and language representation of those contents. Particularly, patent texts can differ from mundane texts in various aspects, which entails significant opportunities and challenges. This paper presents a systematic overview of patent-related tasks and popular methodologies with a special focus on evolving and promising techniques. Language processing and particularly large language models as well as the recent boost of general generative methods promise to become game changers in the patent field. The patent literature and the fact-based argumentative procedures around patents appear almost as an ideal use case. However, patents entail a number of difficulties with which existing models struggle. The paper introduces fundamental aspects of patents and patent-related data that affect technology that wants to explore or manage them. It further reviews existing methods and approaches and points out how important reliable and unbiased evaluation metrics become. Although research has made substantial progress on certain tasks, the performance across many others remains suboptimal, sometimes because of either the special nature of patents and their language or inconsistencies between legal terms and the everyday meaning of terms. Moreover, yet few methods have demonstrated the ability to produce satisfactory text for specific sections of patents. By pointing out key developments, opportunities, and gaps, we aim to encourage further research and accelerate the advancement of this field.

Patent similarity analysis plays a crucial role in evaluating the risk of patent infringement. Nonetheless, this analysis is predominantly conducted manually by legal experts, often resulting in a time-consuming process. Recent advances in natural language processing technology offer a promising avenue for automating this process. However, methods for measuring similarity between patents still rely on experts manually classifying patents. Due to the recent development of artificial intelligence technology, a lot of research is being conducted focusing on the semantic similarity of patents using natural language processing technology. However, it is difficult to accurately analyze patent data, which are legal documents representing complex technologies, using existing natural language processing technologies. To address these limitations, we propose a hybrid methodology that takes into account bibliographic similarity, measures the similarity between patents by considering the semantic similarity of patents, the technical similarity between patents, and the bibliographic information of patents. Using natural language processing techniques, we measure semantic similarity based on patent text and calculate technical similarity through the degree of coexistence of International patent classification (IPC) codes. The similarity of bibliographic information of a patent is calculated using the special characteristics of the patent: citation information, inventor information, and assignee information. We propose a model that assigns reasonable weights to each similarity method considered. With the help of experts, we performed manual similarity evaluations on 420 pairs and evaluated the performance of our model based on this data. We have empirically shown that our method outperforms recent natural language processing techniques.

Recent technological advancements have led to a large number of patents in a diverse range of domains, making it challenging for human experts to analyze and manage. State-of-the-art methods for multi-label patent classification rely on deep neural networks (DNNs), which are complex and often considered black-boxes due to their opaque decision-making processes. In this paper, we propose a novel deep explainable patent classification framework by introducing layer-wise relevance propagation (LRP) to provide human-understandable explanations for predictions. We train several DNN models, including Bi-LSTM, CNN, and CNN-BiLSTM, and propagate the predictions backward from the output layer up to the input layer of the model to identify the relevance of words for individual predictions. Considering the relevance score, we then generate explanations by visualizing relevant words for the predicted patent class. Experimental results on two datasets comprising two-million patent texts demonstrate high performance in terms of various evaluation measures. The explanations generated for each prediction highlight important relevant words that align with the predicted class, making the prediction more understandable. Explainable systems have the potential to facilitate the adoption of complex AI-enabled methods for patent classification in real-world applications.