Microsoft Research Blog

Research Blog

  1. Designer-centered reinforcement learning 

    February 17, 2021 | Batu Aytemiz, Mikhail Jacob, Sam Devlin, and Katja Hofmann

    In video games, nonplayer characters, bots, and other game agents help bring a digital world and its story to life. They can help make the mission of saving humanity feel urgent, transform every turn of a corner into a gamer’s potential demise, and intensify the…

  2. LAMBDA graphic

    LAMBDA: The ultimate Excel worksheet function 

    January 25, 2021 | Andy Gordon and Simon Peyton Jones

    Ever since it was released in the 1980s, Microsoft Excel has changed how people organize, analyze, and visualize their data, providing a basis for decision-making for the millions of people who use it each day. It’s also the world’s most widely used programming language. Excel…

  3. diagram

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

    January 19, 2021 | Zeyuan Allen-Zhu and Yuanzhi Li

    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,…

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

    January 14, 2021 | Pengchuan Zhang, Lei Zhang, and Jianfeng Gao

    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…

  5. graphical user interface

    Unadversarial examples: Designing objects for robust vision 

    December 22, 2020 | Hadi Salman

    Many of the items and objects we use in our daily lives were designed with people in mind. In October, the Reserve Bank of Australia put out into the world its redesigned $100 banknote. Some design elements remained the same—such as color and size, characteristics…