Microsoft Research Blog

Artificial intelligence

  1. InheritSumm: A General, Versatile and Compact Summarizer by Distilling from GPT 

    May 1, 2023

    While large models such as GPT-3 demonstrate exceptional performance in zeroshot and fewshot summarization tasks, their extensive serving and fine-tuning costs hinder their utilization in various applications. Conversely, previous studies have found that although automatic metrics tend to favor smaller fine-tuned models, the quality of…

  2. Imitating Human Behaviour with Diffusion Models 

    May 1, 2023

    Diffusion models have emerged as powerful generative models in the text-to-image domain. This paper studies their application as observation-to-action models for imitating human behaviour in sequential environments. Human behaviour is stochastic and multimodal, with structured correlations between action dimensions. Meanwhile, standard modelling choices in behaviour…

  3. Runtime Variation in Big Data Analytics 

    May 1, 2023 | Yiwen Zhu, Rathijit Sen, Robert Horton, and John Mark Agosta

    The dynamic nature of resource allocation and runtime conditions on Cloud can result in high variability in a job's runtime across multiple iterations, leading to a poor experience. Identifying the sources of such variation and being able to predict and adjust for them is crucial…

  4. Uruguay: Talent Report on the IT Sector 

    April 20, 2023

    Uruguay is a country with a strong Informational Technology (IT) industry, which has been constantly growing. Its IT revenue is generated from both domestic and international sales, demonstrating a process of ongoing internationalization. Considering 2021 sales generated by the sector represented 3.3% of the GDP,…

  5. On the Pareto Front of Multilingual Neural Machine Translation 

    April 7, 2023

    In this work, we study how the generalization performance of a given direction changes with its sampling ratio in Multilingual Neural Machine Translation (MNMT). By training over 200 multilingual models with various model sizes, directions, and total numbers of tasks, we find that scalarization leads…

  6. Provable Safe Reinforcement Learning with Binary Feedback 

    April 1, 2023 | Andrew Bennett, Dipendra Misra, and Nathan Kallus

    Safety is a crucial necessity in many applications of reinforcement learning (RL), whether robotic, automotive, or medical. Many existing approaches to safe RL rely on receiving numeric safety feedback, but in many cases this feedback can only take binary values; that is, whether an action…

  7. Capabilities of GPT-4 on Medical Challenge Problems 

    March 20, 2023

    March 20, 2023 Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in natural language understanding and generation across various domains, including medicine. We present a comprehensive evaluation of GPT-4, a state-of-the-art LLM, on medical competency examinations and benchmark datasets. GPT-4 is a general-purpose model that…