Pointer-Augmented Autoregressive Generation of Patent Claims with Joint Topology and Content Decoding

Pre-trained language models advance patent classification and retrieval by encoding claims as flat token sequences, but they overlook the dependency hierarchy among claims. Incorporating this hierarchy into self-attention poses two challenges. First, claim dependencies include relation types with different levels of reliability, so treating them uniformly may allow noisy technical relations to interfere with more reliable legal citations. Second, claim dependencies are defined at the claim level, whereas Transformer attention operates over tokens, making direct structural injection nontrivial. We propose the Patent Heterogeneous Attention-Guided Graph Encoder (PHAGE), which constructs a typed claim graph that distinguishes legal citations from technical relations. PHAGE projects this claim-level topology into token-level attention through a connectivity mask and learnable relation-aware biases, and fine-tunes the encoder using a dual-granularity contrastive objective that combines inter-patent taxonomy with intra-patent topology. At inference, the graph-specific attention components are removed, allowing representations to be generated through a standard encoder forward pass without CDG construction. Experiments on patent classification, retrieval, and clustering show that PHAGE consistently outperforms domain-adapted and citation-aware baselines, demonstrating the value of claim-level structural guidance for graph-free patent representation learning.

Speculative decoding accelerates LLM inference only when drafted continuations survive target-model verification. Semi-autoregressive drafters such as DSpark predict an entire token block with one backbone forward and refine it with a lightweight Markov head. However, DSpark decodes this block as a single chain, so an early mismatch invalidates the remaining suffix and limits the benefit of large draft blocks. We show that the conditional structure already learned by DSpark can support multiple parent-consistent continuations without retraining or additional backbone passes. We introduce Parent-Conditioned Drafting Tree (PCTree), which uses the pretrained Markov head to score alternative children separately for each concrete parent and allocates a fixed verification budget to the most probable paths. This converts DSpark's linear draft into a tree while preserving its one-pass parallel backbone. Across Qwen3-{4B,8B,14B} and nine benchmarks, at $B{=}7$, measured speedup gains over autoregressive (AR) decoding, relative to matched DSpark, range from $3.1\%$ to $29.5\%$. On Qwen3-4B GSM8K at $B{=}16$, PCTree increases mean acceptance length from $9.41$ to $11.16$ and three-run mean AR speedup from $6.14{\times}$ to $6.60{\times}$. These show that parent-conditioned branching can turn conditional capacity already present in a semi-autoregressive drafter into end-to-end inference gains through an inference-only change.

Patent claim drafting is a challenging legal drafting task that requires technical expertise, precise linguistic control, strict adherence to formal conventions, and the preservation of complex logical relationships among claim elements. While Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has been widely used to improve the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs), recent evidence suggests that its benefits may be limited, or even negative, in highly structured or pattern-sensitive tasks. Therefore, this paper investigates whether CoT prompting benefits patent claim generation. We propose a task-specific CoT method for patent claim generation and evaluate its effectiveness through both automatic metrics and human expert assessment. Our results show that reasoning-enhanced prompting can improve claim quality. Moreover, we demonstrate a counter-intuitive but important empirical finding: implicit CoT, where reasoning is kept internal rather than explicitly verbalized, consistently outperforms explicit CoT. Through systematic analysis, we show that explicit CoT can introduce an unnecessary information bottleneck for claim generation. Verbalized reasoning may compromise the quality of final outputs through three specific mechanisms: abstraction of critical details, disruption of internalized generation patterns, and cascading error propagation. Our findings provide new insights into legal tasks and CoT applications.