HEXA: Self-supervised pretraining with hard examples improves visual representations

Humans perceive the world through observing a large number of visual scenes around us and then effectively generalizing—in other words, interpreting and identifying scenes they haven’t encountered before—without heavily relying on labeled annotations for every single scene. One of the core aspirations in artificial intelligence is to develop algorithms and techniques that endow computers with a strong generalization ability to learn only from raw pixel data to make sense of the visual world, which aligns more closely with how humans […]

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AAAI 2021: Accelerating the impact of artificial intelligence

The purpose of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, according to its bylaws, is twofold. The first is to promote research in the area of AI, and the second is to promote the responsible use of these types of technology. The result was a 35th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-21) schedule that broadens the possibilities of AI and is heavily reflective of a pivotal time in AI research when experts are asking bigger questions about how best to responsibly develop, deploy, and integrate the technology.   Microsoft and its researchers have been pursuing  

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Speller100: Zero-shot spelling correction at scale for 100-plus languages

At Microsoft Bing, our mission is to delight users everywhere with the best search experience. We serve a diverse set of customers all over the planet who issue queries in over 100 languages. In search we’ve found about 15% of queries submitted by customers have misspellings. When queries are misspelled, we match the wrong set of documents and trigger incorrect answers, which can produce a suboptimal results page for our customers. Therefore, spelling correction is the very first component in […]

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Research Collection – Shall we play a game?

From a research point of view, games offer an amazing environment in which to develop new machine learning algorithms and techniques. And we hope, in due course, that those new algorithms will feed back not just into gaming, but into many other domains. Beyond the very technical machine learning techniques themselves, gaming is an environment in which we can explore the relationship between AI and people, and see how they can work in partnership. It’s a very rich environment in […]

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Three mysteries in deep learning: Ensemble, knowledge distillation, and self-distillation

Under now-standard techniques, such as over-parameterization, batch-normalization, and adding residual links, “modern age” neural network training—at least for image classification tasks and many others—is usually quite stable. Using standard neural network architectures and training algorithms (typically SGD with momentum), the learned models perform consistently well, not only in terms of training accuracy but even in test accuracy, regardless of which random initialization or random data order is used during the training. For instance, if one trains the same WideResNet-28-10 architecture […]

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VinVL: Advancing the state of the art for vision-language models

Humans understand the world by perceiving and fusing information from multiple channels, such as images viewed by the eyes, voices heard by the ears, and other forms of sensory input. One of the core aspirations in AI is to develop algorithms that endow computers with a similar ability: to effectively learn from multimodal data like vision-language to make sense of the world around us. For example, vision-language (VL) systems allow searching the relevant images for a text query (or vice […]

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Microsoft DeBERTa surpasses human performance on the SuperGLUE benchmark

Natural language understanding (NLU) is one of the longest running goals in AI, and SuperGLUE is currently among the most challenging benchmarks for evaluating NLU models. The benchmark consists of a wide range of NLU tasks, including question answering, natural language inference, co-reference resolution, word sense disambiguation, and others. Take the causal reasoning task (COPA in Figure 1) as an example. Given the premise “the child became immune to the disease” and the question “what’s the cause for this?,” the […]

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Research at Microsoft 2020: Addressing the present while looking to the future

Microsoft researchers pursue the big questions about what the world will be like in the future and the role technology will play. Not only do they take on the responsibility of exploring the long-term vision of their research, but they must also be ready to react to the immediate needs of the present. This year in particular, they were asked to use their roles as futurists to address pressing societal challenges. In early 2020, as countries began responding to COVID-19 […]

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