Microsoft Research Lab – Asia
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Agent Lightning: Adding reinforcement learning to AI agents without code rewrites
| Xufang Luo, Yuge Zhang, Zhiyuan He, Zilong Wang, Dongsheng Li, Luna K. Qiu, and Yuqing Yang
By decoupling how agents work from how they’re trained, Agent Lightning turns each step an agent takes into data for reinforcement learning. This makes it easy for developers to improve agent performance with almost zero code changes.
“Curiosity drives scientific breakthroughs, and the tools we create often reflect the human motivations behind that curiosity.” For Yansen Wang, a senior researcher at Microsoft Research Asia, this philosophy has guided his work at the intersection of AI and neuroscience.…
AI assistants, designed to perform actions on behalf of users, may not be as capable as current benchmarks suggest. New research reveals that existing tests for UI grounding—the ability of assistants to locate elements in the graphical user interface (GUI)—have…
Computer-use agents are AI systems that autonomously navigate and interact with software applications through graphical user interfaces (GUIs), and they are emerging as a new capability in artificial intelligence. By navigating and manipulating the same visual interfaces that people use,…
In recent years, as the shift toward agentic AI has accelerated, automation has advanced to handle increasingly complex tasks, from document and code generation to image creation, visual understanding, and mathematical reasoning. This trend points to the growing need to…
When industry knowledge meets PIKE-RAG: The innovation behind Signify’s customer service boost
| Industry Innovation Center
A collaboration between Signify and Microsoft Research shows how PIKE-RAG improves enterprise knowledge systems, delivering a 12% increase in accuracy and faster, more reliable answers.
Large vision-language models are improving at describing images, yet hallucinations still erode trust by introducing contradictions and fabricated details that limit practical applications. In response, Microsoft Research Asia has developed On-Policy Alignment DPO (OPA-DPO), a new algorithm that aligns expert…
Developers who are blind or have low vision have historically been limited to back-end programming, but new research suggests AI programming assistants are changing that in remarkable ways. A Microsoft Research Asia study found that developers who use screen readers…
Awards | The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
Lidong Zhou awarded Honorary Fellowship by HKUST