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 Scalable Differentiable Causal Discovery in the Presence of Latent Confounders with Skeleton Posterior Differentiable causal discovery has made significant advancements in the learning of directed acyclic graphs. However, its application to real-world datasets remains restricted due to the ubiquity of latent confounders and the requirement to learn maximal ancestral  

LI LYNA ZHANG: Thank you for having me. HUIZINGA: So let’s start with a brief overview of your paper. Tell us about the issue your research addresses and why it matters. ZHANG: OK, so this paper is about how to effectively extend the context window of large language models beyond 2 million tokens. Why this is important? Because enabling longer input contexts can improve LLM capabilities. Right now, some LLMs can only handle a limited context window of 4K tokens, […]

In an era increasingly steered by data, machine learning is a pivotal force, transforming vast amounts of information into actionable intelligence with unprecedented speed and accuracy. For example, recent advances in machine learning have led to breakthroughs in precision health, helping doctors make more informed decisions about patient care. Similarly, in climate science, machine learning is improving scientists’ ability to predict and mitigate the impact of extreme weather events. These innovations illustrate that machine learning not only streamlines workflows, it […]

MITRA: So the post-training phase is very important for language models. You can really improve the model a lot by creating high-quality synthetic data. The problem is, however, though, high-quality synthetic data creation requires lots of human effort and expertise. The problem that we’re trying to tackle is, how do you reduce human effort? How can you create high-quality data with really low amount of human effort? When you have a language model and, let’s say, you want to apply […]

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 MG-TSD: Advancing time series analysis with multi-granularity guided diffusion model Diffusion probabilistic models have the capacity to generate high-fidelity samples for generative time series forecasting. However, they also present issues of instability due to their stochastic nature. In a recent article: MG-TSD: Advancing time series analysis with multi-granularity  

Rising carbon emissions have significantly challenged sustainable development in recent years, prompting global efforts to implement carbon reduction policies and achieve long-term carbon neutrality. A crucial step in this transition involves the recycling and reuse of power batteries, which are assessed for their state-of-health (SoH) and then repaired or restructured for reuse in smaller-sized electric vehicles (EVs), energy storage systems, and smart streetlights. This process not only extends battery life but also maximizes their residual value. However, accurately assessing this […]

This paper has been accepted at the 1st ACM International Conference on AI-powered Software (opens in new tab) (AIware 2024), co-located with FSE 2024 (opens in new tab). AIware is the premier international forum on AI-powered software. Generative AI has redefined the landscape of AI assistants in software development, with innovations like GitHub Copilot providing real-time, chat-based programming support. As these tools increase in sophistication and domain specialization, assessing their impact  

Large language models (LLMs) have become a valuable technology in areas such as content creation, language comprehension, and intelligent dialogue, or interactions between people and computer systems. However, these models generate responses based on patterns and rules observed in fixed training data, which can potentially lead them to produce erroneous and even fictitious information. The models can also struggle with real-time knowledge updates. One technique known as retrieval augmented generation (RAG) can organically combine fresh external information  

Human trafficking and labor exploitation are ancient problems that have evolved with each major leap in technology, from the agricultural revolution to the information age. But what if the right combination of people, data, and technology could help to tackle these problems on an unprecedented scale? With the emergence of generative AI models, which can create rich text and media from natural language prompts and real-world understanding, we are seeing new opportunities to advance the work of organizations that are […]

Earlier this year, we introduced GraphRAG (opens in new tab), a graph-based approach to retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) that enables question-answering over private or previously unseen datasets. Today, we’re pleased to announce that GraphRAG is now available on GitHub (opens in new tab), offering more structured information retrieval and comprehensive response generation than naive RAG approaches. The GraphRAG code repository is complemented by a solution accelerator (opens in new tab), providing an easy-to-use