Grounded Revision vs. Prior Injection: Probing Retrieval-Augmented Patent Claim Amendment

Josepha Michiko Leo, Hyun-seok Min, Yehoon Jang, Irvan Zidny, Jin-Woo Chung, Sungchul Choi


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.
Anthology ID:
2026.findings-aacl.16
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: IJCNLP-AACL 2026
Month:
November
Year:
2026
Address:
Hengqin, China
Editors:
Yue Zhang, Ruifeng Xu, Ayu Purwarianti, Tong Rong, Jun Suzuki
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
281–299
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URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-aacl.16/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Josepha Michiko Leo, Hyun-seok Min, Yehoon Jang, Irvan Zidny, Jin-Woo Chung, and Sungchul Choi. 2026. Grounded Revision vs. Prior Injection: Probing Retrieval-Augmented Patent Claim Amendment. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: IJCNLP-AACL 2026, pages 281–299, Hengqin, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Grounded Revision vs. Prior Injection: Probing Retrieval-Augmented Patent Claim Amendment (Leo et al., Findings 2026)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-aacl.16.pdf