Computer vision has rapidly evolved over the past decade, allowing for such applications as Seeing AI, a camera app that describes aloud a person’s surroundings, helping those who are blind or have low vision; systems that can detect whether a product, such as a computer chip or article of clothing, has been assembled correctly, improving quality control; and services that can convert information from hard-copy documents into a digital format, making it easier to manage personal and business data. All […]

Pretrained language models have been a hot research topic in natural language processing. These models, such as BERT, are usually pretrained on large-scale language corpora with carefully designed pretraining objectives and then fine-tuned on downstream tasks to boost the accuracy. Among these, masked language modeling (MLM), adopted in BERT, and permuted language modeling (PLM), adopted in XLNet, are two representative pretraining objectives. However, both of them enjoy their own advantages but suffer from limitations. Therefore, researchers from Microsoft Research Asia, […]

As human beings, we encounter unfamiliar situations all the time—learning to drive, living on our own for the first time, starting a new job. And while we can anticipate what to expect based on what others have told us or what we’ve picked up from books and depictions in movies and TV, it isn’t until we’re behind the wheel of a car, maintaining an apartment, or doing a job in a workplace that we’re able to take advantage of one […]

Reinforcement learning is about agents taking information from the world and learning a policy for interacting with it, so that they perform better. So, you can imagine a future where, every time you type on the keyboard, the keyboard learns to understand you better. Or every time you interact with some website, it understands better what your preferences are, so the world just starts working better and better at interacting with people. John Langford, Partner Research Manager, MSR NYC Fundamentally, […]

We are going through a new shift in machine learning (ML), where ML models are increasingly being used to automate decision-making in a multitude of domains: what personalized treatment should be administered to a patient, what discount should be offered to an online customer, and other important decisions that can greatly impact people’s lives. The machine learning revolution was primarily driven by problems that are distant from such decision-making scenarios. The first scenarios include predicting what an image depicts, predicting […]