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  

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 Towards Energy Efficient 5G vRAN Servers Virtualized radio access networks (vRANs), which run the cellular radio stack on commodity servers instead of specialized hardware, are increasingly used in modern cellular networks (e.g., 5G), owing to advantages such as a multi-vendor ecosystem, easier maintenance, and faster feature upgrades. In a recent  

In the intertwined worlds of psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and artificial intelligence, scientists continue to pursue the elusive goal of decoding and mimicking human and animal behavior. One of the most intriguing aspects of this research is the interplay between two types of behaviors: habitual and goal directed. Traditionally, these behaviors are believed  

Microsoft is proud to sponsor the 41st annual Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR 2024), held from June 17 to June 21. This premier conference covers a broad spectrum of topics in the field, including 3D reconstruction and modeling, action and motion analysis, video and image processing, synthetic data generation, neural networks, and many more. This year, 63 papers from Microsoft have been accepted, with six selected for oral presentations. This post highlights  

Multi-agent approaches to AI applications, where multiple foundation model-based agents collaborate to solve problems, are emerging as a powerful paradigm for accomplishing increasingly complex tasks. In September 2023, we released AutoGen – a flexible and open-source Python-based framework for defining, configuring, and composing AI agents to drive multi-agent applications. Today, we are introducing AutoGen Studio (version 0.1.0) – a low-code interface for rapidly building, testing, and sharing multi-agent solutions.  

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 RELEVANCE: Automatic evaluation framework for LLM responses Relevance in AI refers to the usefulness of information or actions to a specific task or query. It helps determine the accuracy, effectiveness, efficiency, and user satisfaction of content from search engines, chatbots, and other AI systems. RELEVANCE (Relevance and Entropy-based