Is It Novel and Why? Fine-Grained Patent Novelty Prediction Based on Passage Retrieval

ArXi:2605.02392v1 Announce Type: new 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.