USPTO Appeals Review Panel Vacates PTAB Section 101 Rejection

On September 26, 2025 The Appeals Review Panel ("ARP") of the Patent Trial and Appeal Board ("Board") issued a decision in Ex parte Desjardins et al., related to U.S. Patent Application No. 16/319,040, assigned to DeepMind Technologies Limited. The application concerns methods for training machine learning models, specifically addressing continual learning and the problem of "catastrophic forgetting" when models are trained on multiple tasks sequentially.

The Board had previously introduced a new ground of rejection under 35 U.S.C. § 101 (in addition to a rejection under Section 103 based on prior art references), finding the claims directed to an abstract idea (mathematical calculation) and thus patent-ineligible. On rehearing, the ARP vacated this new ground of rejection, finding that the claims, when considered as a whole, are not directed to an abstract idea but instead integrate the abstract idea into a practical application. The ARP did not disturb any of the