2026 to present
Teaching a small model to classify patents
Research Assistant · Trustworthy Digital Society (UNSW × UTS)
Early-stage collaborative research on teaching a small local model to classify patents and explain its choice. Paper in progress. Not published and not production-ready.
Overview
This is ongoing early-stage research with a colleague at Trustworthy Digital Society. Patent classification is slow expert work against a large hierarchy of codes. Large models can help, but they are expensive to run at scale, and patent applications often cannot be sent to external APIs.
The idea is a small model that can run locally, assign a code, and give a reason for it, using reasoning from a larger model as a teaching signal. The paper is still in progress. There are no published results yet, and the work is not a production system.
Status
More detail will go up when the paper is further along. Until then, treat this as research in progress rather than a finished case study.