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 .
Response to Amendment
This is in response to Applicant’s Arguments/Remarks filed on May 14th, 2026, which has
been entered and made of record.
Response to Arguments
Rejections - 35 USC § 101
Applicant’s arguments, see Remarks filed May 14th 2026, with respect to claims 1-20 have been fully considered but are not persuasive.
Applicant argues although the claimed features reference, “calculating a distance”, “performing linear transformation”, and “addition”, the mere presence of mathematical operations does not render a claim “directed to” a mathematical concept. The distance calculation is used to generate a feature in a transformer network. The addition operation is used to fuse together multiple features to generate new features which is subsequently used to obtain a classification result (Remarks pg. 11).
The examiner respectfully disagrees. See MPEP section 2106.04(a)(2) reciting, “a claim that recites a mathematical calculation, when the claim is given its broadest reasonable interpretation in light of the specification, will be considered as falling within the "mathematical concepts" grouping. A mathematical calculation is a mathematical operation (such as multiplication) or an act of calculating using mathematical methods to determine a variable or number”. Here the mathematical operations such as, “calculating a distance”, “performing linear transformation”, “performing a first fusion”, and “addition” are mathematical operations recited between features, typically presented as numbers in the art. Much of the claim involves using mathematical operations to determine a feature/a number. The mere recitation of the mathematical calculations being involved in a transformer network and being used to obtain a classification result are additional elements considered insignificant extra solution activity as a general tie to a field of use.
Applicant further argues the claim, “when considered as a whole, improve the functioning of computer technology and the technical field of transformer-based image classification. In contrast to the conventional transformer network, which relies on multiplication-dominant dot-product operations, which imposes significant computational and power burdens and hinder deployment on resource-constrained devices, claim 1 instead requires generating features based on distance and performing fusion using addition operations, thereby reducing reliance on multiplication operations” (Remarks, pg. 12).
The examiner respectfully disagrees, because of the broadest reasonable interpretation of the “addition operation”. Although applicant argues there may be technological improvement in the functioning of a transformer neural network by reducing computational overhead, the improvement is not reflected by the claims as currently written since the addition operation is recited with such breadth it is not clear how the addition operation would reduce computational overhead/how it is an improvement in the technological field. For example, the addition operation being interpreted with the scope of cited prior art Dosovitskiy is within the matrix multiplication, a known transformer practice. Therefore, the claims as currently presented do not reflect the improvement to a technical field because of the breadth of the recitation of the addition operation.
Rejections - 35 USC § 102/103
Applicant’s arguments filed May 14th, 2026 regarding the rejection of claim(s) 1-20 under 35
USC § 102/103 have been fully considered, but they are not persuasive.
Applicant argues, “Dosovitskiy, however, only discloses the self-attention output is equal to an attention weight matrix Aij multiplied by the value v matrix. Here, the operation in equation 7 of Dosovitskiy is a multiplication operation not an addition operation. That is v is weighted by multiplying v by the weights matrix Aij” (Remarks, pg. 16).
The examiner respectfully disagrees. Although a matrix multiplication is being performed in equation 7, the amended claim recites broadly that the fusion is processed based on an addition operation, with no other detail of the operation itself. Matrix multiplication inherently involves addition between elements of the particular row of a first matrix and particular column of a second matrix being multiplied. There are no other claim limitations currently present that impose restrictions on what addition operation is being performed that prevent the interpretation of the addition within the matrix multiplication to be read as the addition operation. Thereby, the art of record is believed to continue reading the claim as currently presented.
Status of Claims
Claims 1-3, 5-10, 12-17, and 19-20 are pending. Claim(s) 1, 5, 8, 12, 15, and 19 were amended. Claim(s) 4, 11, and 18 were canceled. No new claims were added. Claims 1-3, 5-10, 12-17, and 19-20 are considered below.
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 101
35 U.S.C. 101 reads as follows:
Whoever invents or discovers any new and useful process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter, or any new and useful improvement thereof, may obtain a patent therefor, subject to the conditions and requirements of this title.
Claims 1-3, 5-10, 12-17, and 19-20 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 101 because the claimed invention is directed to abstract idea without significantly more.
According to the USPTO guidelines, a claim is directed to non-statutory subject matter if:
STEP 1: the claim does not fall within one of the four statutory categories of invention (process, machine, manufacture or composition of matter), or
STEP 2: the claim recites a judicial exception, e.g. an abstract idea, without reciting additional elements that amount to significantly more than the judicial exception, as determined using the following analysis:
STEP 2A (PRONG 1): Does the claim recite an abstract idea, law of nature, or natural phenomenon?
STEP 2A (PRONG 2): Does the claim recite additional elements that integrate the judicial exception into a practical application?
STEP 2B: Does the claim recite additional elements that amount to significantly more than the judicial exception?
Using the two-step inquiry, it is clear that claims 1-20 are directed to an abstract idea as shown below:
STEP 1: Do the claims fall within one of the statutory categories (i.e. process, a computer readable medium, i.e. a system)? YES. Claims 1-3, and 5-7 are directed to a method, Claims 8-10, and 12-14 are directed to an apparatus, and Claims 15-17, and 19-20 are directed to a non-transitory computer readable medium.
STEP 2A (PRONG 1): Is the claim directed to a law of nature, a natural phenomenon or an abstract idea? YES, the claims are directed towards an abstract idea
With regard to STEP 2A (PRONG 1), the guidelines provide three groupings of subject matter that are considered abstract ideas:
- Mathematical concepts — mathematical relationships, mathematical formulas or equations, mathematical calculations;
- Certain methods of organizing human activity — fundamental economic principles or practices (including hedging, insurance, mitigating risk); commercial or legal interactions (including agreements in the form of contracts; legal obligations
- Mental processes – concepts that are practicably performed in the human mind (including an observation, evaluation, judgement, opinion).
The claim(s) recite(s):
Regarding Claim 1, representative of Claims 8 and 15, reciting an image classification method, wherein the method is implemented by using a transformer network, and the method comprises:
obtaining M first features of a target image, wherein
M
≥
1
(insignificant extra-solution/data gathering step);
performing linear transformation processing based on a kth first feature to obtain a kth second feature, a kth third feature, and a kth fourth feature, wherein k=1, ..., M (Mathematical concepts — mathematical relationships, mathematical formulas or equations, mathematical calculations);
calculating a distance between the kth second feature and the kth third feature to obtain a kth fifth feature (Mathematical concepts — mathematical relationships, mathematical formulas or equations, mathematical calculations);
performing first fusion processing based on the kth fifth feature and the kth fourth feature to obtain a kth sixth feature (Mathematical concepts — mathematical relationships, mathematical formulas or equations, mathematical calculations); and
obtaining a classification result of the target image based on M sixth features (extra-solution/field of use – see step 2A prong 2),
wherein the performing first fusion processing based on the kth fifth feature and the kth fourth feature to obtain a kth sixth feature comprises:
processing an element of the kth fifth feature and an element of the kth fourth feature based on an addition operation to obtain the kth sixth feature (Mathematical concepts — mathematical relationships, mathematical formulas or equations, mathematical calculations).
Regarding Claim 2, representative of Claims 9 and 16, reciting the method according to claim 1, wherein the calculating a distance between the kth second feature and the kth third feature to obtain a kth fifth feature comprises:
calculating the distance between the kth second feature and the kth third feature based on an addition operation to obtain the kth fifth feature (Mathematical concepts — mathematical relationships, mathematical formulas or equations, mathematical calculations).
Regarding Claim 3, representative of Claims 10 and 17, reciting the method according to claim 2, wherein the kth second feature comprises N row vectors, the kth third feature comprises N row vectors, and calculating the distance between the kth second feature and the kth third feature based on an addition operation to obtain the kth fifth feature comprises:
performing subtraction processing on a jth row vector of the kth second feature and an ith row vector of the kth third feature to obtain a pth first intermediate vector, wherein j=1, …, N, i=1, …, N, and p=1, …, NxN (Mathematical concepts — mathematical relationships, mathematical formulas or equations, mathematical calculations);
performing addition processing on all elements of the pth first intermediate vector to obtain an element in a jth row and an ith column of a kth seventh feature (Mathematical concepts — mathematical relationships, mathematical formulas or equations, mathematical calculations); and
performing scaling processing and normalization processing on the kth seventh feature to obtain the kth fifth feature (Mathematical concepts — mathematical relationships, mathematical formulas or equations, mathematical calculations).
Regarding Claim 5, representative of Claims 12 and 19, reciting the method according to claim 4, wherein the kth fourth feature comprises Nxd/M elements, and the processing an element of the kth fifth feature and an element of the kth fourth feature based on an addition operation to obtain the kth sixth feature comprises:
performing absolute value processing on an xth column vector of the kth fourth feature to obtain an absolute-value xth column vector of the kth fourth feature (Mathematical concepts — mathematical relationships, mathematical formulas or equations, mathematical calculations);
performing addition processing on the absolute-value xth column vector and a yth row vector of the kth fifth feature to obtain a qth second intermediate vector, wherein x=1,…,d/M, y=1,…,N, and h=1,…, Nxd/M(Mathematical concepts — mathematical relationships, mathematical formulas or equations, mathematical calculations);
setting a sign of the qth second intermediate vector to be the same as a sign of the xth column vector, to obtain a sign-set qth second intermediate vector (Mathematical concepts — mathematical relationships, mathematical formulas or equations, mathematical calculations); and
performing addition processing on all elements of the sign-set qth second intermediate vector to obtain an element in a yth row and an xth column of the kth sixth feature (Mathematical concepts — mathematical relationships, mathematical formulas or equations, mathematical calculations).
Regarding Claim 6, representative of Claim 13, reciting the method according to claim 1, wherein the linear transformation processing is formed by addition operations (Mathematical concepts — mathematical relationships, mathematical formulas or equations, mathematical calculations).
Regarding Claim 7, representative of Claims 14 and 20, reciting the method according to claim 6, wherein the performing linear transformation processing based on a kth first feature to obtain a kth second feature, a kth third feature, and a kth fourth feature comprises:
obtaining a first weight matrix, a second weight matrix, and a third weight matrix (Mathematical concepts — mathematical relationships, mathematical formulas or equations, mathematical calculations);
performing, by using the first weight matrix, the linear transformation processing formed by addition operations, on the kth first feature to obtain the kth second feature (Mathematical concepts — mathematical relationships, mathematical formulas or equations, mathematical calculations);
performing, by using the second weight matrix, the linear transformation processing formed by addition operations, on the kth first feature to obtain the kth third feature (Mathematical concepts — mathematical relationships, mathematical formulas or equations, mathematical calculations); and
performing, by using the third weight matrix, the linear transformation processing formed by addition operations, on the kth first feature to obtain the kth fourth feature (Mathematical concepts — mathematical relationships, mathematical formulas or equations, mathematical calculations).
STEP 2A (PRONG 2): Does the claim recite additional elements that integrate the judicial exception into a practical application? NO, the claims do not recite additional elements that integrate the judicial exception into a practical application.
With regard to STEP 2A (prong 2), whether the claim recites additional elements that integrate the judicial exception into a practical application, the guidelines provide the following exemplary considerations that are indicative that an additional element (or combination of elements) may have integrated the judicial exception into a practical application:
an additional element reflects an improvement in the functioning of a computer, or an improvement to other technology or technical field;
an additional element that applies or uses a judicial exception to affect a particular treatment or prophylaxis for a disease or medical condition;
an additional element implements a judicial exception with, or uses a judicial exception in conjunction with, a particular machine or manufacture that is integral to the claim;
an additional element effects a transformation or reduction of a particular article to a different state or thing; and
an additional element applies or uses the judicial exception in some other meaningful way beyond generally linking the use of the judicial exception to a particular technological environment, such that the claim as a whole is more than a drafting effort designed to monopolize the exception.
While the guidelines further state that the exemplary considerations are not an exhaustive list and that there may be other examples of integrating the exception into a practical application, the guidelines also list examples in which a judicial exception has not been integrated into a practical application:
an additional element merely recites the words “apply it” (or an equivalent) with the judicial exception, or merely includes instructions to implement an abstract idea on a computer, or merely uses a computer as a tool to perform an abstract idea;
an additional element adds insignificant extra-solution activity to the judicial exception; and
an additional element does no more than generally link the use of a judicial exception to a particular technological environment or field of use.
Claims 1-3, 5-10, 12-17, and 19-20 do not recite any of the exemplary considerations that are indicative of an abstract idea having been integrated into a practical application. Claim 1 notably recites obtaining a classification result of the target image based on M sixth features, however this appears to be generally linking the result of the mathematical operations to a technological environment/field of use – that being generic image classification.
STEP 2B: Does the claim recite additional elements that amount to significantly more than the judicial exception? NO, the claims do not recite additional elements that amount to significantly more than the judicial exception.
With regard to STEP 2B, whether the claims recite additional elements that provide significantly more than the recited judicial exception, the guidelines specify that the pre-guideline procedure is still in effect. Specifically, that examiners should continue to consider whether an additional element or combination of elements:
adds a specific limitation or combination of limitations that are not well-understood, routine, conventional activity in the field, which is indicative that an inventive concept may be present; or
simply appends well-understood, routine, conventional activities previously known to the industry, specified at a high level of generality, to the judicial exception, which is indicative that an inventive concept may not be present.
Claims 1-3, 5-10, 12-17, and 19-20 does/do not recite any additional elements that are not well-understood, routine or conventional.
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 102
The following is a quotation of the appropriate paragraphs of 35 U.S.C. 102 that form the basis for the rejections under this section made in this Office action:
A person shall be entitled to a patent unless –
(a)(1) the claimed invention was patented, described in a printed publication, or in public use, on sale, or otherwise available to the public before the effective filing date of the claimed invention.
Claim(s) 1-2, 8-9, and 15-16 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 102(a)(1) as being unpatentable by Dosovitskiy (Alexey Dosovitskiy et al: "An Image is Worth 16X16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale." arXiv:2010.11929v2 [cs.CV] 3 Jun 2021).
Regarding Claim 1, representative of Claims 8 and 15, Dosovitskiy teaches an image classification method, wherein the method is implemented by using a transformer network, and the method comprises:
obtaining M first features of a target image, wherein
M
≥
1
([Section 3.1, paragraph 1]: to handle 2D images we reshape the image x into a sequence of flattened 2D patches x.sub.p…resulting number of patches, which also serves as the effective input sequence length for the Transformer);
performing linear transformation processing based on a kth first feature to obtain a kth second feature, a kth third feature, and a kth fourth feature, wherein k=1, ..., M ([Appendix, section A]: Standard qkv self-attention (SA, Vaswani et al. (2017)) is a popular building block. See equation 5. Examiner notes the second feature to be the query, the third feature to be the key, and the fourth feature to be the value);
calculating a distance between the kth second feature and the kth third feature to obtain a kth fifth feature ([Appendix, section A]: attention weights Aij are based on the pairwise similarity between two elements of the sequence and their respective query q i and key k j representations. See equation 6. Examiner notes the similarity calculation between queries (second feature) and keys (third features) to obtain attention weights (fifth feature));
performing first fusion processing based on the kth fifth feature and the kth fourth feature to obtain a kth sixth feature ([Appendix A, see equation 7], Examiner notes, the attention weights (fifth features) are then multiplied with the values (fourth features) for the self-attention calculation); and
obtaining a classification result of the target image based on M sixth features (see Fig. 1 transformer encoder results fed into MLP head leading to classification (i.e. bird, ball, car)),
wherein the performing first fusion processing based on the kth fifth feature and the kth fourth feature to obtain a kth sixth feature comprises:
processing an element of the kth fifth feature and an element of the kth fourth feature based on an addition operation to obtain the kth sixth feature ([Appendix A, see equation 7], Examiner notes, the attention weights (fifth features) are then multiplied with the values (fourth features) for the self-attention calculation as a weighted sum).
Regarding Claim 2, representative of Claims 9 and 16, Dosovitskiy teaches the method according to claim 1. In addition, Dosovitskiy teaches wherein the calculating a distance between the kth second feature and the kth third feature to obtain a kth fifth feature comprises:
calculating the distance between the kth second feature and the kth third feature based on an addition operation to obtain the kth fifth feature ([Appendix, section A]: attention weights Aij are based on the pairwise similarity between two elements of the sequence and their respective query q i and key k j representations. See equation 6 including qkT describing a dot product which involves addition between individually multiplied elements. Examiner notes the similarity calculation between queries (second feature) and keys (third features) to obtain attention weights (fifth feature)).
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 103
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.
Claim(s) 6-7, 13-14, and 20 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Dosovitskiy (Alexey Dosovitskiy et al: "An Image is Worth 16X16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale." arXiv:2010.11929v2 [cs.CV] 3 Jun 2021) in view of Vaswani (Ashish Vaswani et al, "Attention Is All You Need", arXiv: 1706.03762v5 [cs.CL] 6 Dec 2017, XP055506908).
Regarding Claim 6, representative of Claim 13, Dosovitskiy teaches the method according to claim 1. Dosovitskiy does not explicitly teach the remaining limitations of Claim 6, however Vaswani teaches wherein the linear transformation processing is formed by addition operations ([section 3.2.2 paragraph 1]: linearly project the queries, keys and values h times with different, learned linear projections to dk, dk and dv dimensions, respectively. On each of these projected versions of queries, keys and values we then perform the attention function. Examiner notes the linear transformations appear to be matrix multiplication involving addition).
It would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filing date of the present invention to have modified Dosovitskiy to explicitly include the teachings of Vaswani by substituting the general mention of attaining queries, keys, and values for Vaswani’s explicit linear projections resulting in queries, keys, and values. Doing so would provide the predictable result of attaining queries, keys, and values for a transformer network.
Regarding Claim 7, representative of Claims 14 and 20, Dosovitskiy teaches the method according to claim 6. Dosovitskiy does not explicitly teach the remaining limitations of Claim 6, however Vaswani teaches wherein the performing linear transformation processing based on a kth first feature to obtain a kth second feature, a kth third feature, and a kth fourth feature comprises:
obtaining a first weight matrix, a second weight matrix, and a third weight matrix ([Section 3.2.2]: where the projections are parameter matrices W Q i ∈ R dmodel×dk , W K i ∈ R dmodel×dk , WV i ∈ R dmodel×dv);
performing, by using the first weight matrix, the linear transformation processing formed by addition operations, on the kth first feature to obtain the kth second feature ([section 3.2.2] linearly project the queries, keys and values h times with different, learned linear projections to dk, dk and dv dimensions, respectively... where the projections are parameter matrices W Q i ∈ R dmodel×dk , W K i ∈ R dmodel×dk , WV i ∈ R dmodel×dv. Examiner notes linear projection with the W_Q matrix results in projected queries (second features));
performing, by using the second weight matrix, the linear transformation processing formed by addition operations, on the kth first feature to obtain the kth third feature([section 3.2.2] linearly project the queries, keys and values h times with different, learned linear projections to dk, dk and dv dimensions, respectively... where the projections are parameter matrices W Q i ∈ R dmodel×dk , W K i ∈ R dmodel×dk , WV i ∈ R dmodel×dv. Examiner notes linear projection with the W_K matrix results in projected keys (third feature)); and
performing, by using the third weight matrix, the linear transformation processing formed by addition operations, on the kth first feature to obtain the kth fourth feature ([section 3.2.2] linearly project the queries, keys and values h times with different, learned linear projections to dk, dk and dv dimensions, respectively... where the projections are parameter matrices W Q i ∈ R dmodel×dk , W K i ∈ R dmodel×dk , WV i ∈ R dmodel×dv. Examiner notes linear projection with the W_V matrix results in projected values (fourth feature)).
Conclusion
THIS ACTION IS MADE FINAL. Applicant is reminded of the extension of time policy as set forth in 37 CFR 1.136(a).
A shortened statutory period for reply to this final action is set to expire THREE MONTHS from the mailing date of this action. In the event a first reply is filed within TWO MONTHS of the mailing date of this final action and the advisory action is not mailed until after the end of the THREE-MONTH shortened statutory period, then the shortened statutory period will expire on the date the advisory action is mailed, and any nonprovisional extension fee (37 CFR 1.17(a)) pursuant to 37 CFR 1.136(a) will be calculated from the mailing date of the advisory action. In no event, however, will the statutory period for reply expire later than SIX MONTHS from the mailing date of this final action.
Any inquiry concerning this communication or earlier communications from the examiner should be directed to JANICE VAZ whose telephone number is (703)756-4685. The examiner can normally be reached Monday-Friday 9:00-5:00pm.
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If attempts to reach the examiner by telephone are unsuccessful, the examiner’s supervisor, Matthew Bella can be reached at (571) 272-7778. The fax phone number for the organization where this application or proceeding is assigned is 571-273-8300.
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/JANICE E. VAZ/Examiner, Art Unit 2667
/MATTHEW C BELLA/Supervisory Patent Examiner, Art Unit 2667
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