Welcome to Research Focus, a series of blog posts that highlights notable publications, events, code/datasets, new hires and other milestones from across the research community at Microsoft. NEW RESEARCH Fewer is More: Boosting LLM Reasoning with Reinforced Context Pruning Large language models (LLMs) have shown impressive capabilities, yet they still struggle with math reasoning. In a recent paper: Fewer is More: Boosting LLM Reasoning with Reinforced Context Pruning, researchers from Microsoft propose CoT-Influx, a  

In the evolving field of software development, professionals are increasingly adopting a modern approach known as service-oriented architecture to enhance the scalability and flexibility of their services and applications. Often utilizing a microservices approach, developers construct software as a collection of small, independently functioning services. This method is particularly advantageous for developing cloud-based software, as it offers numerous benefits over the traditional monolithic architectures, including the ability to separately develop, deploy, and scale individual components of an application. Nevertheless, this […]

Researchers at Microsoft have been working for nearly a decade to address the increasing demand for data storage mechanisms to support the rapid advances in interactive web applications and services. Our new cache-store system called Garnet, which offers several advantages over legacy cache-stores, has been deployed in multiple use cases at Microsoft, such as those in the Windows & Web Experiences Platform, Azure Resource Manager, and Azure  

Microsoft Research and Cyted have collaborated to build novel AI models (opens in new tab) to scale the early detection of esophageal cancer. The AI-supported methods demonstrated the same diagnostic performance as the existing manual workflow, potentially reducing the pathologist’s workload by up to 63%. Esophageal cancer is the sixth most common cause of cancer deaths worldwide, in part because this disease  

This research paper was presented at the 17th ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (opens in new tab) (WSDM 2024), the premier conference on web-inspired research on search and data mining. In today’s data-driven landscape, tables are indispensable for organizing and presenting information, particularly text. They streamline repetitive content, enhance  

Research advances are driving real-world impact faster than ever. Recent developments in AI are reshaping the way people live, work, and think. In the latest episode of Microsoft Research Forum (opens in new tab), we explore how AI is transforming health care and the natural sciences, the intersection of AI and society, and the continuing evolution of foundational AI technologies.  Below is a brief recap of the event, including select quotes from the presentations. Full replays of each session and […]

Welcome to Research Focus, a series of blog posts that highlights notable publications, events, code/datasets, new hires and other milestones from across the research community at Microsoft. NEW RESEARCH Generative Kaleidoscopic Networks Neural networks are deep learning models that can be trained to learn complex patterns and relationships within data. In a recent paper: Generative Kaleidoscopic Networks, researchers from Microsoft detail how they discovered an “over-generalization” phenomenon, which indicates that the neural networks tend to  

Our work on Orca and Orca 2 demonstrated the power of improved training signals and methods to enhance the reasoning abilities of smaller language models, getting closer to the levels found in much larger language models. Orca-Math is another step in this direction, where we explore the capabilities of small language models (SLMs) when specialized in a certain area, in this case solving grade school math problems, which has long been recognized as a complex task for SLMs. Orca-Math  

Molecular geometry  

LEV TANKELEVITCH: Thanks for having me.  HUIZINGA: So in just a couple sentences—a metacognitive elevator pitch, if you will—tell us about the issue or problem your paper addresses and, more importantly, why we should care about it.  TANKELEVITCH: Sure. So as generative AI has, sort of, rolled out over the last year or two, we’ve seen some user studies come out, and as we read these studies, we noticed there are a lot of challenges that people face with these […]