DETAILED ACTION
In response to the amendment filed on 03/04/2026, all the amendment to the claims have been entered and the action follows:
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 .
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 112
The following is a quotation of 35 U.S.C. 112(b):
(b) CONCLUSION.—The specification shall conclude with one or more claims particularly pointing out and distinctly claiming the subject matter which the inventor or a joint inventor regards as the invention.
The following is a quotation of 35 U.S.C. 112 (pre-AIA ), second paragraph:
The specification shall conclude with one or more claims particularly pointing out and distinctly claiming the subject matter which the applicant regards as his invention.
Claims 1-16 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 112(b) or 35 U.S.C. 112 (pre-AIA ), second paragraph, as being indefinite for failing to particularly point out and distinctly claim the subject matter which the inventor or a joint inventor (or for applications subject to pre-AIA 35 U.S.C. 112, the applicant), regards as the invention.
Claim 1 is rejected for being indefinite because the recited limitations are inconsistent with the applicant’s specification, and one of ordinary skill in the art could not clearly interpret the metes and bounds of the claimed invention.
The claim recites limitations “applying a soft mask to the plurality of patch features” and “generating a joint embedding by inputting the masked plurality of patch features”, that indicate that a soft mask is applied first and then a joint embedding is generated later. However, the applicant’s fig 3 describes otherwise: joint embedding is applied first in S34 and soft masking is applied later in S36. Please amend the claim or the drawing for clarification. Similar reasons apply to claims 15 and 16.
Allowable Subject Matter
The prior art of record does not disclose the subject matter recited in claims 1-16, however, these claims are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 112(b) as stated above. These claims would be allowable if amended to overcome the 112(b) rejection.
Regarding claim 1, Li et al. (“Align before fuse: vision and language representation learning with momentum distillation”) discloses:
generating a plurality of patch features for an image sample through an image encoder, wherein the image sample and a text sample form a positive pair (see section 3.1, generating image features {vcls, v1, …, vN} for an input image I through an image encoder; and see section 3.2, positive and negative image-text pairs); and
generating a plurality of token features for the text sample through a text encoder (see section 3.1, generating text features {wcls, w1, ..., wN} for an input text T through a text encoder).
However, Li does not disclose: applying a soft mask to the plurality of patch features, the soft mask being associated with a specific token of the text sample; generating a joint embedding by inputting the masked plurality of patch features and the plurality of token features into a multimodal encoder; and updating the multimodal encoder by performing an image-text matching (ITM) task based on the joint embedding. In particular, the applicant provided an explicit definition to the limitation “applying a soft mask” to be equivalent to applying a mask composed of weights/coefficients of continuous values between 0 and 1 instead of 0 and 1, which is not disclosed by Li. Similar reasons apply to claims 15 and 16.
Response to Arguments
Arguments regarding 112(b)
The applicant argues that claim amendments overcome the 112(b) rejection. The examiner respectfully disagrees. Specifically, the rejection under 112(b) mailed on 12/04/2025 recites item ii) on page 4 that points out that the applicant’s claim limitations are inconsistent with the drawing, which has not been addressed by the applicant. Therefore, this rejection is maintained.
Arguments regarding prior art
In view of the claim amendments and the arguments, the rejection under 102 has been withdrawn.
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 SJ PARK whose telephone number is (571)270-3569. The examiner can normally be reached M-F 8:00 AM - 5:00 PM.
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/SJ Park/Primary Examiner, Art Unit 2675