This week, Microsoft Research threw down the gauntlet with the launch of a competition challenging researchers around the world to develop AI agents that can solve text-based games. Conceived by the Machine Reading Comprehension team at Microsoft Research Montreal, the competition—First TextWorld Problems: A Reinforcement…
One empirical finding in deep learning is that simple methods such as stochastic gradient descent (SGD) have a remarkable ability to fit training data. From a capacity perspective, this may not be surprising— modern neural networks are heavily over-parameterized, with the number of parameters much…
In the larger quest to make the Internet of Things (IoT) a reality for people everywhere, building devices that can be both ultrafunctional and beneficent isn’t a simple matter. Particularly in the arena of resource-constrained, real-time scenarios, the hurdles are significant. The challenges for devices…
Teaching is super important. From an individual perspective, a student learning on his or her own is never ideal; a student needs a teacher's guidance and perspective to be more effectively educated. Taking the societal perspective, teaching enables civilization to be passed on to the…
Modern machine learning is characterized by two key features: high-dimensional models and very large datasets. Each of these features presents its own unique challenges, from basic issues such as storing and accessing all of the data to more intricate mathematical quests such as finding good…
Microsoft Research’s Natural Language Processing group has set an ambitious goal for itself: to create a neural model that can engage in the full scope of conversational capabilities, providing answers to requests while also bringing the value of additional information relevant to the exchange and—in…
Today we are extremely excited to announce that our Microsoft Simple Encrypted Arithmetic Library (Microsoft SEAL), an easy-to-use homomorphic encryption library developed by researchers in the Cryptography Research group at Microsoft, is open source on GitHub under an MIT License for free use. The library…
Chatbots come in many flavors, but most can be placed in one of two categories: goal-oriented chatbots and chit-chat chatbots. Goal-oriented chatbots behave like a natural language interface for function calls, where the chatbot asks for and confirms all required parameter values and then executes…
If you’re a deep learning practitioner, you may find yourself faced with the same critical question on a regular basis: Which neural network architecture should I choose for my current task? The decision depends on a variety of factors and the answers to a number…
In 1928, Alexander Fleming accidentally let his petri dishes go moldy, a mistake that would lead to the breakthrough discovery of penicillin and save the lives of countless people. From these haphazard beginnings, the pharmaceutical industry has grown into one of the most technically advanced…
What does it take to build one of the most reliable hyperscale clouds on the planet? It clearly requires astronomical investments and a vast organization that operates at global scale in near seamless coordination. Yet the breakthroughs that fuel this story emerged organically, from a…
With the latest Project Malmo competition, we’re calling on researchers and engineers to test the limits of their thinking as it pertains to artificial intelligence, particularly multi-task, multi-agent reinforcement learning. Last week, a group of attendees at the 14th Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive…
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