Microsoft Research Blog

Artificial intelligence

  1. 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…

  2. 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…

  3. Invariant Aggregator for Defending against Federated Backdoor Attacks 

    May 2, 2024 | Xiaoya Wang, Dimitrios Dimitriadis, Oluwasanmi Koyejo, and Shruti Tople

    Federated learning enables training high-utility models across several clients without directly sharing their private data. As a downside, the federated setting makes the model vulnerable to various adversarial attacks in the presence of malicious clients. Despite the theoretical and empirical success in defending against attacks…

  4. Selective Pre-training for Private Fine-tuning 

    May 1, 2024

    Suppose we want to train text prediction models in email clients or word processors. The models must preserve the privacy of user data and adhere to a specific fixed size to meet memory and inference time requirements. We introduce a generic framework to solve this…

  5. Rescaling Intermediate Features Makes Trained Consistency Models Perform Better 

    May 1, 2024

    In the domain of deep generative models, diffusion models are renowned for their high-quality image generation but are constrained by intensive computational demands. To mitigate this, consistency models have been proposed as a computationally efficient alternative. Our research reveals that post-training rescaling of internal features…

  6. Large Language Models Cannot Explain Themselves 

    May 1, 2024 | Advait Sarkar

    Large language models can be prompted to produce text. They can also be prompted to produce "explanations" of their output. But these are not really explanations, because they do not accurately reflect the mechanical process underlying the prediction. The illusion that they reflect the reasoning…

  7. Efficiently Computing Similarities to Private Datasets 

    May 1, 2024

    Many methods in differentially private model training rely on computing the similarity between a query point (such as public or synthetic data) and private data. We abstract out this common subroutine and study the following fundamental algorithmic problem: Given a similarity function f and a…

  8. Improving the Training of Rectified Flows 

    May 1, 2024 | Sangyun Lee, Zinan Lin, and Giulia Fanti

    Diffusion models have shown great promise for image and video generation, but sampling from state-of-the-art models requires expensive numerical integration of a generative ODE. One approach for tackling this problem is rectified flows, which iteratively learn smooth ODE paths that are less susceptible to truncation…

  9. Network visualization

    From Local to Global: A Graph RAG Approach to Query-Focused Summarization 

    April 24, 2024

    The use of retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to retrieve relevant information from an external knowledge source enables large language models (LLMs) to answer questions over private and/or previously unseen document collections. However, RAG fails on global questions directed at an entire text corpus, such as "What…

  10. Semantically Aligned Question and Code Generation for Automated Insight Generation 

    April 20, 2024

    Automated insight generation is a common tactic for helping knowledge workers, such as data scientists, to quickly understand the potential value of new and unfamiliar data. Unfortunately, automated insights produced by large-language models can generate code that does not correctly correspond (or \emph{align}) to the…

  11. RD2Bench: Toward Data-Centric Automatic R&D 

    April 16, 2024

    The progress of humanity is driven by those successful discoveries accompanied by countless failed experiments. Researchers often seek the potential research directions by reading and then verifying them through experiments. The process imposes a significant burden on researchers. In the past decade, the data-driven black-box…