DETAILED ACTION
Notice of Pre-AIA or AIA Status
The present application, filed on or after March 16, 2013, is being examined under the first inventor to file provisions of the AIA .
Continued Examination Under 37 CFR 1.114
A request for continued examination under 37 CFR 1.114, including the fee set forth in 37 CFR 1.17(e), was filed in this application after final rejection. Since this application is eligible for continued examination under 37 CFR 1.114, and the fee set forth in 37 CFR 1.17(e) has been timely paid, the finality of the previous Office action has been withdrawn pursuant to 37 CFR 1.114. Applicant's submission filed on 02/05/2026 has been entered. Claims 1-2, 4-8, 10-12, 14-18 and 20 are pending. Claims 3, 9, 13 and 19 have been canceled without prejudice.
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 112
The following is a quotation of the first paragraph of 35 U.S.C. 112(a):
(a) IN GENERAL.—The specification shall contain a written description of the invention, and of the manner and process of making and using it, in such full, clear, concise, and exact terms as to enable any person skilled in the art to which it pertains, or with which it is most nearly connected, to make and use the same, and shall set forth the best mode contemplated by the inventor or joint inventor of carrying out the invention.
The following is a quotation of the first paragraph of pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. 112:
The specification shall contain a written description of the invention, and of the manner and process of making and using it, in such full, clear, concise, and exact terms as to enable any person skilled in the art to which it pertains, or with which it is most nearly connected, to make and use the same, and shall set forth the best mode contemplated by the inventor of carrying out his invention.
Claims 1-2, 4-7, 11-12, and 14-17 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 112(a) or 35 U.S.C. 112 (pre-AIA ), first paragraph, as failing to comply with the written description requirement. The claims 1 and 11 contain subject matter “first task layer” and “second task layer” which was not described in the specification in such a way as to reasonably convey to one skilled in the relevant art that the inventor or a joint inventor, or for applications subject to pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. 112, the inventor(s), at the time the application was filed, had possession of the claimed invention. In this case, Examiner finds Figure 1A, which describes “training layer 131” and “training layer 132”, but nowhere in the Specification describes “task layer”. Please verify.
Claims 2,4-7 further depend claim 1, and claims 12, 14-17 further depend claim 11. Therefore, claims 2, 4-7, 12, and 14-17 are rejected under the same rationale.
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 103
In the event the determination of the status of the application as subject to AIA 35 U.S.C. 102 and 103 (or as subject to pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. 102 and 103) is incorrect, any correction of the statutory basis (i.e., changing from AIA to pre-AIA ) for the rejection will not be considered a new ground of rejection if the prior art relied upon, and the rationale supporting the rejection, would be the same under either status.
The following is a quotation of 35 U.S.C. 103 which forms the basis for all obviousness rejections set forth in this Office action:
A patent for a claimed invention may not be obtained, notwithstanding that the claimed invention is not identically disclosed as set forth in section 102, if the differences between the claimed invention and the prior art are such that the claimed invention as a whole would have been obvious before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to a person having ordinary skill in the art to which the claimed invention pertains. Patentability shall not be negated by the manner in which the invention was made.
The text of those sections of Title 35, U.S. Code not included in this action can be found in a prior Office action.
The factual inquiries for establishing a background for determining obviousness under 35 U.S.C. 103 are summarized as follows:
1. Determining the scope and contents of the prior art.
2. Ascertaining the differences between the prior art and the claims at issue.
3. Resolving the level of ordinary skill in the pertinent art.
4. Considering objective evidence present in the application indicating obviousness or nonobviousness.
This application currently names joint inventors. In considering patentability of the claims the examiner presumes that the subject matter of the various claims was commonly owned as of the effective filing date of the claimed invention(s) absent any evidence to the contrary. Applicant is advised of the obligation under 37 CFR 1.56 to point out the inventor and effective filing dates of each claim that was not commonly owned as of the effective filing date of the later invention in order for the examiner to consider the applicability of 35 U.S.C. 102(b)(2)(C) for any potential 35 U.S.C. 102(a)(2) prior art against the later invention.
Claims 8, 10, 18 and 20 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Liu et al. (Liu), US Patent Application Publication No. US 2023/0042327 A1, and further in view of Semichev et al. (Semichev), US Patent Application Publication No. US 2022/0084371 A1.
As independent claim 8, Liu discloses a method comprising:
self-supervised first training an encoder to encode a sequence of log messages into an encoded trace (paragraph [0046] and Figure 8: during self-supervised learning, one single encoder may be employed to generate embeddings of two views of one sequence);
connecting, after the first training, the encoder to a neural network (Figure 3 and Claim 1: performing contrastive learning to the neural network system to generate a trained neural network system, wherein the performing the contrastive learning includes performing first model augmentation to a first encoder of the neural network system to generate a first embedding of a sample);
second training the neural network (paragraphs [0025], [0027]: perform training using the neural network model for various tasks).
Liu, however, does not disclose detect whether a sequence of database command is anomalous, wherein the second training is not self-supervised.
In the same field of endeavor, Semichev discloses devices, systems, and methods for self-supervised and/or unsupervised training methods and implementation of a model for detecting anomalous automated teller machine (ATM) customer interactions for a respective ATM customer in real-time and for detecting anomalous behavior across a population (paragraph [0003]). Semichev further discloses the system may receive ATM logs comprising ATM customer data for a plurality of customers, wherein ATM logs may include data associated with a customer ATM session, including data indicative of every action taken by the customer during the interaction, for example, ATM logs may include data indicating that the ATM customer entered his or her PIN (database command) incorrectly on the first attempt or customer does not check balance before attempting to withdraw unusual for a given customer amounts of cash (paragraph [0025]). Semichev further discloses the system may employ a tokenization process in which an activities vocabulary is derived from the ATM logs during the tokenization process, which is referred as methos to split and encode raw sequences of ATM logs (text or binary) to a machine-readable form consumable by a machine learning model, or ATM session activities can be encoded as sequence (paragraph [0026]). Semichev further discloses the system (anomaly detection system) has undergone unsupervised training and may be used to determine anomalous ATM activity for a particular user and secure a customer session (paragraph [0029]).
It would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art, before the effective filing date of the claimed invention, to modify the system of Liu to include detect whether a sequence of database command is anomalous, wherein the second training is not self-supervised, as taught by Semichev for the purpose of providing unsupervised detection of anomalous ATM customer interactions during a customer session (Semichev, paragraphs [0035], [0036]).
As to independent claim 10, Liu discloses a method comprising:
generating a neural network that accepts a complete sequence of data and a subsequence of data as input, wherein the neural network contains an encoder that can encode the complete sequence of data into an encoded trace (Figure 3 and Claim 1: performing contrastive learning to the neural network system to generate a trained neural network system, wherein the performing the contrastive learning includes performing first model augmentation to a first encoder of the neural network system to generate a first embedding of a sample; paragraph [0023]: neural network module may be used to translate structured text; paragraphs [0029]-[0031]: augmented sequence of data is inputted into encoder);
self-supervised training the neural network to detect whether the complete sequence of data contains the subsequence of data, wherein the training the neural network comprises training the encoder (paragraph [0046] and Figure 8: during self-supervised learning, one single encoder may be employed to generate embeddings of two views of one sequence);
deploying, after the training the encoder, the encoder without the neural network (paragraph [0047]: during the inference stage, only model encoder 306 is used).
As pointed out above that Liu teaches in paragraph [0023]: neural network module may be used to translate structured text; paragraphs [0029]-[0031]: augmented sequence of data (message) is inputted into encoder. However, Liu does not disclose sequence of data is sequence of database commands.
In the same field of endeavor, Semichev discloses devices, systems, and methods for self-supervised and/or unsupervised training methods and implementation of a model for detecting anomalous automated teller machine (ATM) customer interactions for a respective ATM customer in real-time and for detecting anomalous behavior across a population (paragraph [0003]). Semichev further discloses the system may receive ATM logs comprising ATM customer data for a plurality of customers, wherein ATM logs may include data associated with a customer ATM session, including data indicative of every action taken by the customer during the interaction, for example, ATM logs may include data indicating that the ATM customer entered his or her PIN (database commands) incorrectly on the first attempt or customer does not check balance before attempting to withdraw unusual for a given customer amounts of cash (paragraph [0025]). Semichev further discloses the system may employ a tokenization process in which an activities vocabulary is derived from the ATM logs during the tokenization process, which is referred as methos to split and encode raw sequences of ATM logs (text or binary) to a machine-readable form consumable by a machine learning model, or ATM session activities can be encoded as sequence (paragraph [0026]). Semichev further discloses the system (anomaly detection system) has undergone unsupervised training and may be sued to determine anomalous ATM activity for a particular user and secure a customer session (paragraph [0029]).
It would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art, before the effective filing date of the claimed invention, to modify the system of Liu to include sequence of ATM logs (database commands) is inputted into a neural network, as taught by Semichev for the purpose of providing detection of anomalous ATM customer interactions during a customer session (Semichev, paragraphs [0035], [0036]).
Claim 18 is media claims that contain similar limitations of claim 8. Therefore, claims 18 is rejected under the same rationale.
Claim 20 is medium claim that contains similar limitations of claim 10. Therefore, claim 20 is rejected under the same rationale.
Response to Arguments
In the Remarks, Applicant argues in substance that original claim 3 and paragraphs [0077] and [0078] of the Specification (originally filed) would support Claim 1’s recited “task layer”. Examiner disagrees because even though the original claim 3 recites “task layer”, Examiner did not recognize the recited limitation “task layer” not described in the Specification. As mentioned above, paragraphs [0077] and [0078] only describe “training layer 131” and “training layer 132”, but nowhere in the Specification describes “task layer”. For this reason, Examiner still maintains the rejection under 35 U.S.C. 112.
Applicant’s arguments and amendments filed on 02/05/2026 have been fully considered but they are not deemed fully persuasive. Applicant’s arguments with respect to claims 1-2, 4-8, 10-12, 14-18 and 20 have been considered but are moot in view of the new ground(s) of rejection as explained here below, necessitated by Applicant’s substantial amendment (i.e., database commands) to the claims which significantly affected the scope thereof. Please see the rejection above with newly cited prior art Semichev.
Conclusion
Any inquiry concerning this communication should be directed to CHAU T NGUYEN at telephone number (571)272-4092. The examiner can normally be reached on M-F from 8am to 5pm (PT).
Examiner interviews are available via telephone, in-person, and video conferencing using a USPTO supplied web-based collaboration tool. To schedule an interview, applicant is encouraged to use the USPTO Automated Interview Request (AIR) Form at https://www.uspto.gov/patents/uspto-automated-interview-request-air-form.
If attempts to reach the examiner by telephone are unsuccessful, the examiner’s supervisor, Cesar Paula, can be reached at telephone number 5712724128. The fax phone number for the organization where this application or proceeding is assigned is 571-273-8300.
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/CHAU T NGUYEN/Primary Examiner, Art Unit 2145
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