Introduction
1. This office action is in response to Applicant’s submission filed on 11/11/2024. Claims 1-20 are pending in the application and have been examined.
Notice of Pre-AIA or AIA Status
2. The present application, filed on or after March 16, 2013, is being examined under the first inventor to file provisions of the AIA .
Information Disclosure Statement
3. The information disclosure statement (IDS) submitted on 11/11/2024 is in compliance with the provisions of 37 CFR 1.97. Accordingly, the information disclosure statement is being considered by the examiner.
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 103
4. 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 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.
5. Claims 1-20 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as unpatentable over U.S. Pat. App. Pub. No. 20250217753 (Makhijaet al, hereinfter “Mak”).
With regard to Claim 1, Mak describes:
“A method, comprising:
receiving at a machine learning (ML) model a first textual input; (Paragraph 102 describes that the device receives input text.)
generating a first encoded input from the received first textual input; (Paragraph 102 describes encoding the text inputs.)
selecting a first adapter from an adapter pool having a plurality of adapters, (Paragraph 7 describes that one of a plurality of tools is selected.) each adapter of the plurality of adapters being a module that defines a given task to be performed by the ML model and having an associated key, the first adapter being selected by having an associated first key that has a highest similarity to the first encoded input, appending the selected first adapter to the first encoded input, to one or more layers of the ML model, or to a combination of the first encoded input and the one or more layers (Paragraph 44 describes that the adapters each have a key (such as OpenAI, ChatGPT, Bard, etc.) and the adapter chosen is most similar to the input. The invocation of the AI tool selected is input to the model by the encoded input or directly to the model.)”
inputting the first encoded input into the ML model [[after]] the selected first adapter has been appended to the first encoded input, to the one or more layers of the ML model, or to the combination of the first encoded input and the one or more layers to thereby generate a first textual output according to an intent of the first textual input.” (Paragraph 10 describes that an intent is determined, and that the tool is selected which modifies the LLM invocation by either modifying the input or the LLM. Paragraph 102 describes that an output is provided by the model based on the input.)
Mak does not explicitly describe that the intent is determined after selecting the tool. However, there are only 2 possibilities, selecting the tool before or after determining the intent. Thus, due to the limited number of possible solutions, selecting the tool before the intent is determined is rendered obvious. See MPEP 2143(1)(e)
It would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to include the determining the intent after selecting the tool due to the limited number of possible solutions. See MPEP 2143(1)(e)
With regard to Claim 2, Mak describes “the selected adapter is appended to are embedding layers and/or fully connected layers to activations in the model.” Paragraph 8 describes that the model includes multiple layer, one of which is modified by the selected tool.
With regard to Claim 3, Mak describes “the selected first adapter is appended to the encoded input.” Paragraph 75 describes that the input is modified by the required format of the selected tool.
With regard to Claim 4, Mak describes “the selected first adapter is retained in the adapter pool after the ML has generated a textual output according to an intent of the textual input. Paragraph 7 describes that the tool repository is updated based on previous processing, including the previous output.
With regard to Claim 5, Mak describes “each adapter of the adapter pool further defines a domain for each of the defined tasks.” Paragraph 71 describes that the tools are domain specific tools.
With regard to Claim 6, Mak describes “selecting the first adapter having the associated first key that has a highest similarity to the first encoded input comprises: calculating a dissimilarity function between the first key and the encoded input to thereby find a distance between the first key and the first encoded input in key space.” Paragraph 106 describes that the tool selection is done by a model finetuned to select the most appropriate tool, which would minimize a distance between the selected tool and the input.
With regard to Claim 7, Mak describes “each adapter of the plurality of adapters in the adapter pool is trained using a labeled dataset for the given task, the training including determining a most performant adapter technique that defines how each adapter will be appended to the first encoded input, to the one or more layers of the ML model, or to the combination of the first encoded input and the one or more layers.” Paragraph 106 describes that the tool selection is done by a trained model trained to select the most appropriate tool.
With regard to Claim 8, Mak describes “each key associated with each adapter of the plurality of adapters in the adapter pool is trained by minimizing a dissimilarity function between the each key and each task defined by each adapter of the plurality of adapters.” Paragraph 106 describes that the tool selection is done by a model finetuned to select the most appropriate tool, which would minimize a distance between the selected tool and the input.
With regard to Claim 9, Mak describes “the ML model is a Large Language Model (LLM) or a Pre-Trained Language Model (PLM).” Paragraph 9 describes that the model is an LLM.
With regard to Claim 9, Mak describes “receiving at the ML model a second textual input; (Paragraph 102 describes that the device receives input text.)
generating a second encoded input from the received second textual input; (Paragraph 102 describes encoding the text inputs.)
selecting a second adapter from the plurality of adapters in the adapter pool having an associated second key that has a highest similarity to the second encoded input; (Paragraph 7 describes that one of a plurality of tools is selected. Paragraph 44 describes that the adapters each have a key (such as OpenAI, ChatGPT, Bard, etc.) and the adapter chosen is most similar to the input. The invocation of the AI tool selected is input to the model by the encoded input or directly to the model.)
appending the selected second adapter to the second encoded input, to the one or more layers of the ML model, or to the combination of the second encoded input and the one or more layers; (Paragraph 10 describes that the tool is selected which modifies the LLM invocation by either modifying the input or the LLM.) and
inputting the second encoded input into the ML model after the selected second adapter has been appended to the second encoded input, to the one or more layers of the ML model, or to the combination of the first encoded input and the one or more layers to thereby generate a second textual output according to an intent of the second textual input. (Paragraph 102 describes that an output is provided by the model based on the input.)
With respect to Claims 11-20, method Claim 1 and storage medium Claim 11 are related as a storage medium programmed to perform the same method, with each claimed storage medium function corresponding to each claimed method step. Accordingly, Claims 11-20 are similarly rejected under the same rationale as applied above with respect to Claims 1-10.
Conclusion
6. The prior art made of record and not relied upon is considered pertinent to applicant's disclosure.
U.S. Pat. App. Pub. No. 20250086563 (Dey et al.) also selecting one of a plurality of tools based on text input.
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/EDWARD TRACY JR./Examiner, Art Unit 2656
/BHAVESH M MEHTA/Supervisory Patent Examiner, Art Unit 2656
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