Microsoft Research Blog

Artificial intelligence

  1. Reading Between the Lines: Modeling User Behavior and Costs in AI-Assisted Programming 

    May 11, 2024 | Hussein Mozannar, Gagan Bansal, Adam Fourney, and Eric Horvitz

    Code-recommendation systems, such as Copilot and CodeWhisperer, have the potential to improve programmer productivity by suggesting and auto-completing code. However, to fully realize their potential, we must understand how programmers interact with these systems and identify ways to improve that interaction. To make progress, we…

  2. Improving Offline RL by Blending Heuristics 

    May 11, 2024 | Sinong Geng, Aldo Pacchiano, Andrey Kolobov, and Ching-An Cheng

    We propose Heuristic Blending (HUBL), a simple performance-improving technique for a broad class of offline RL algorithms based on value bootstrapping. HUBL modifies Bellman operators used in these algorithms, partially replacing the bootstrapped values with Monte-Carlo returns as heuristics. For trajectories with higher returns, HUBL…

  3. MatterSim: A Deep Learning Atomistic Model Across Elements, Temperatures and Pressures 

    May 8, 2024

    Accurate and fast prediction of materials properties is central to the digital transformation of materials design. However, the vast design space and diverse operating conditions pose significant challenges for accurately modeling arbitrary material candidates and forecasting their properties. We present MatterSim, a deep learning model…

  4. Differentially Private Synthetic Data via Foundation Model APIs 1: Images 

    May 7, 2024

    Generating differentially private (DP) synthetic data that closely resembles the original private data without leaking sensitive user information is a scalable way to mitigate privacy concerns in the current data-driven world. In contrast to current practices that train customized models for this task, we aim…

  5. Skeleton-of-Thought: Prompting LLMs for Efficient Parallel Generation 

    May 7, 2024

    This work aims at decreasing the end-to-end generation latency of large language models (LLMs). One of the major causes of the high generation latency is the sequential decoding approach adopted by almost all state-of-the-art LLMs. In this work, motivated by the thinking and writing process…

  6. Mixture-of-Linear-Experts for Long-term Time Series Forecasting 

    May 2, 2024 | Ronghao Ni, Zinan Lin, Shuaiqi Wang, and Giulia Fanti

    Long-term time series forecasting (LTSF) aims to predict future values of a time series given the past values. The current state-of-the-art (SOTA) on this problem is attained in some cases by linear-centric models, which primarily feature a linear mapping layer. However, due to their inherent…