@inproceedings{leo-etal-2026-grounded,
title = "Grounded Revision vs. Prior Injection: Probing Retrieval-Augmented Patent Claim Amendment",
author = "Leo, Josepha Michiko and
Min, Hyun-seok and
Jang, Yehoon and
Zidny, Irvan and
Chung, Jin-Woo and
Choi, Sungchul",
editor = "Zhang, Yue and
Xu, Ruifeng and
Purwarianti, Ayu and
Rong, Tong and
Suzuki, Jun",
booktitle = "Findings of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics: {IJCNLP}-{AACL} 2026",
month = nov,
year = "2026",
address = "Hengqin, China",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-aacl.16/",
pages = "281--299",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-444-6",
abstract = "Retrieval-augmented generation is widely used in professional writing, yet whether retrieval grounds revision or merely injects templates is rarely tested where ``correct'' has a definable meaning. Patent claim amendment supplies that signal: the examiner names the attacked limitation and cites prior art, providing per-case ground truth. We release three artifacts: (i) a corpus of 7,385 USPTO prosecution cases with XML-aligned pre/post claims, rejection, and cited prior art; (ii) a seven-probe battery comparing random and structural-match retrieval as two policies under a fixed prompt scaffold; (iii) a deterministic five-channel metric (C1-C3 and C5 in main, C4 supplementary) requiring no LLM evaluation. Across 9,600 pre-registered calls on four frontier LLMs (Claude Sonnet 4, Claude Haiku 4.5, GPT-5.4, GPT-4o-mini), no tested model exhibits detectable classical prior-injection behavior; retrieval effects are small and direction-inconsistent between random and structural retrieval, and the null is unchanged under a dense (semantic) retriever, across retrieval depths k in {1,3,5,10}, and under a paraphrase-sensitive grounding metric. Revision locality reveals a model-specific difference that the template channel misses. The four-cell taxonomy, which we treat as exploratory, leaves the prior-injector cell unoccupied."
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<abstract>Retrieval-augmented generation is widely used in professional writing, yet whether retrieval grounds revision or merely injects templates is rarely tested where “correct” has a definable meaning. Patent claim amendment supplies that signal: the examiner names the attacked limitation and cites prior art, providing per-case ground truth. We release three artifacts: (i) a corpus of 7,385 USPTO prosecution cases with XML-aligned pre/post claims, rejection, and cited prior art; (ii) a seven-probe battery comparing random and structural-match retrieval as two policies under a fixed prompt scaffold; (iii) a deterministic five-channel metric (C1-C3 and C5 in main, C4 supplementary) requiring no LLM evaluation. Across 9,600 pre-registered calls on four frontier LLMs (Claude Sonnet 4, Claude Haiku 4.5, GPT-5.4, GPT-4o-mini), no tested model exhibits detectable classical prior-injection behavior; retrieval effects are small and direction-inconsistent between random and structural retrieval, and the null is unchanged under a dense (semantic) retriever, across retrieval depths k in 1,3,5,10, and under a paraphrase-sensitive grounding metric. Revision locality reveals a model-specific difference that the template channel misses. The four-cell taxonomy, which we treat as exploratory, leaves the prior-injector cell unoccupied.</abstract>
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T Grounded Revision vs. Prior Injection: Probing Retrieval-Augmented Patent Claim Amendment
%A Leo, Josepha Michiko
%A Min, Hyun-seok
%A Jang, Yehoon
%A Zidny, Irvan
%A Chung, Jin-Woo
%A Choi, Sungchul
%Y Zhang, Yue
%Y Xu, Ruifeng
%Y Purwarianti, Ayu
%Y Rong, Tong
%Y Suzuki, Jun
%S Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: IJCNLP-AACL 2026
%D 2026
%8 November
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C Hengqin, China
%@ 979-8-89176-444-6
%F leo-etal-2026-grounded
%X Retrieval-augmented generation is widely used in professional writing, yet whether retrieval grounds revision or merely injects templates is rarely tested where “correct” has a definable meaning. Patent claim amendment supplies that signal: the examiner names the attacked limitation and cites prior art, providing per-case ground truth. We release three artifacts: (i) a corpus of 7,385 USPTO prosecution cases with XML-aligned pre/post claims, rejection, and cited prior art; (ii) a seven-probe battery comparing random and structural-match retrieval as two policies under a fixed prompt scaffold; (iii) a deterministic five-channel metric (C1-C3 and C5 in main, C4 supplementary) requiring no LLM evaluation. Across 9,600 pre-registered calls on four frontier LLMs (Claude Sonnet 4, Claude Haiku 4.5, GPT-5.4, GPT-4o-mini), no tested model exhibits detectable classical prior-injection behavior; retrieval effects are small and direction-inconsistent between random and structural retrieval, and the null is unchanged under a dense (semantic) retriever, across retrieval depths k in 1,3,5,10, and under a paraphrase-sensitive grounding metric. Revision locality reveals a model-specific difference that the template channel misses. The four-cell taxonomy, which we treat as exploratory, leaves the prior-injector cell unoccupied.
%U https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-aacl.16/
%P 281-299
Markdown (Informal)
[Grounded Revision vs. Prior Injection: Probing Retrieval-Augmented Patent Claim Amendment](https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-aacl.16/) (Leo et al., Findings 2026)
ACL