Research
Translator, a Microsoft Azure Cognitive Service, is adopting Z-code Mixture of Experts models, a breakthrough AI technology that significantly improves the quality of production translation models. As a component of Microsoft’s larger XYZ-code initiative to combine AI models for text, vision, audio, and language, Z-code…
Cloud computing is powering a new age of data and AI by democratizing access to scalable compute, storage, and networking infrastructure and services. Thanks to the cloud, organizations can now collect data at an unprecedented scale and use it to train complex models and generate…
Quantum computing promises to help us solve some of humanity’s greatest challenges. Yet as an industry, we are still in the early days of discovering what’s possible. Today’s quantum computers are enabling researchers to do interesting work. However, these researchers often find themselves limited by…
For children born blind, social interaction can be particularly challenging. A child may have difficulty aiming their voice at the person they’re talking to and put their head on their desk instead. Linguistically advanced young people may struggle with maintaining a topic of conversation, talking…
Great scientific achievements cannot be made by trial and error alone. Every launch in the space program is underpinned by centuries of fundamental research in aerodynamics, propulsion, and celestial bodies. In the same way, when it comes to building large-scale AI systems, fundamental research forms…
Humans have the fundamental cognitive ability to perceive the environment through multimodal sensory signals and utilize this to accomplish a wide variety of tasks. It is crucial that an autonomous agent can similarly perceive the underlying state of an environment from different sensors and appropriately…
As the pandemic overburdens medical facilities and clinicians become increasingly overworked, the ability to make quick decisions on providing the best possible treatment is even more critical. In urgent health situations, such decisions can mean life or death. However, certain treatment protocols can pose a…
Inflated expectations around the capabilities of AI technologies may lead people to believe that computers can’t be wrong. The truth is AI failures are not a matter of if but when. AI is a human endeavor that combines information about people and the physical world…
In the last three years, the largest trained dense models have increased in size by over 1,000 times, from a few hundred million parameters to over 500 billion parameters in Megatron-Turing NLG 530B (MT-NLG). Improvements in model quality with size suggest that this trend will…
From manufacturing and logistics to agriculture and transportation, the expansion of artificial intelligence (AI) in the last decade has revolutionized a multitude of industries—examples include enhancing predictive analytics on the manufacturing floor and making microclimate predictions so that farmers can respond and save their crops…
![An illustration of the KEAR architecture represented by five panels side by side. The first contains an input question—“What is a treat that your dog will enjoy?”—and the answer choices “salad,” “petted,” “affection,” “bone,” and “lots of attention.” The second panel has three boxes, each representing retrieval from a specific knowledge source. A box labeled “Knowledge Graph” has a silhouette of a dog and underneath it and labeled “desires” a silhouette of a dog being petted; a heart representing “affection”; a bone; and clapping hands representing “lots of attention.” A box labeled “relevant questions” has the question “What do dogs like to eat?” and the accompanying answer “Bones.” A boxed labeled “dictionary” contains the definition of “bone”: “a composite material making up the skeleton of most vertebrates.” The third panel, labeled “concatenation with input,” contains the input question followed by “Dog, desires, bone. Dog, desires, lots of attention” followed by the relevant question and finally the dictionary definition of bone. In between each is a separation token [SEP]. The fourth panel is labeled “language model” and contains a quote box labeled “language services,” a cube labeled “model,” and left and right braces punctuation within a circle labeled “language understanding.” The fifth panel is labeled “output” and includes silhouettes of each of the five answer choices. The silhouette of the bone is highlighted in blue, representing the appropriate response.](https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/1400x788_Common_Sense_still_no_logo-1-scaled.jpg){kind=logo}
KEAR (Knowledgeable External Attention for commonsense Reasoning)—along with recent milestones in computer vision and neural text-to-speech—is part of a larger Azure AI (opens in new tab) mission to provide relevant, meaningful AI solutions and services that work better for people because they better capture how people learn and work—with…
Neural Text-to-Speech—along with recent milestones in computer vision and question answering—is part of a larger Azure AI (opens in new tab) mission to provide relevant, meaningful AI solutions and services that work better for people because they better capture how people learn and work—with improved…
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