Adaptive Cost-Efficient Evaluation for Reliable Patent Claim Validation

2026-04-05

AI Summary

This work addresses the challenge of patent claim validation, which demands zero tolerance for errors yet struggles to balance the insufficient accuracy of lightweight models against the prohibitive computational cost of large language models (LLMs). To this end, we propose the ACE framework, which innovatively integrates an entropy-driven adaptive routing mechanism with a Chain-of-Patent-Thought (CoPT) protocol grounded in 35 U.S.C. legal standards. Claims exhibiting high prediction uncertainty are dynamically routed to expert LLMs, while the remainder are processed by an efficient lightweight encoder. This approach maintains high verification reliability while substantially reducing computational overhead, achieving a 94.95% F1 score on the ACE-40k benchmark and cutting operational costs by 78% compared to pure LLM-based solutions.

Abstract

Automated validation of patent claims demands zero-defect tolerance, as even a single structural flaw can render a claim legally defective. Existing evaluation paradigms suffer from a rigidity-resource dilemma: lightweight encoders struggle with nuanced legal dependencies, while exhaustive verification via Large Language Models (LLMs) is prohibitively costly. To bridge this gap, we propose ACE (Adaptive Cost-efficient Evaluation), a hybrid framework that uses predictive entropy to route only high-uncertainty claims to an expert LLM. The expert then executes a Chain of Patent Thought (CoPT) protocol grounded in 35 U.S.C. statutory standards. This design enables ACE to handle long-range legal dependencies more effectively while preserving efficiency. ACE achieves the best F1 among the evaluated methods at 94.95\%, while reducing operational costs by 78\% compared to standalone LLM deployments. We also construct ACE-40k, a 40,000-claim benchmark with MPEP-grounded error annotations, to facilitate further research.

Problem

• patent claim validation
• cost-efficiency
• zero-defect tolerance
• legal dependencies
• evaluation rigidity

Innovation

• Adaptive Evaluation
• Cost-Efficient LLM
• Chain of Patent Thought
• Predictive Entropy Routing
• Patent Claim Validation