Towards Automated Patent Workflows: AI-Orchestrated Multi-Agent Framework for Intellectual Property Management and Analysis

“Patents are the currency of innovation, and like any currency, they need to be managed and protected” (Gavin Potenza). Patents, as legal documents that secure intellectual property rights, play a critical role in technological innovation. The growing complexity of patent documents and the surge in patent applications have created a need for automated solutions in patent analysis. In this work, we presentPatExpert, an autonomous multi-agent conversational framework designed to streamline and optimize patent-related tasks. The framework consists of a meta-agent that coordinates task-specific expert agents for various patent-related tasks and a critique agent for error handling and feedback provision. The meta-agent orchestrates specialized expert agents, each fine-tuned for specific tasks such aspatent classification, acceptance, claim generation, abstractive summarization, multi-patent analysis, and scientific hypothesis generation. For multi-patent analysis, the framework incorporates advanced methods like Graph Retrieval-Augmented Generation (GRAG) to enhance response accuracy and relevance by combining semantic similarity with knowledge graphs. Error handling is managed by critique agents (Gold-LLM-as-a-Judge and Reward-LLM-as-a-Judge), which evaluate output responses for accuracy and provide iterative feedback. The framework also prioritizes explainability, ensuring transparent justifications for decisions made during patent analysis. Its comprehensive capabilities make it a valuable tool for automating complex patent workflows, enhancing efficiency, accuracy, and compliance in patent-related tasks. Empirical evidence demonstrates significant improvements in patent processing tasks, concluding that the framework offers a robust solution for automating and optimizing patent analysis.