Microsoft Research Blog

Artificial intelligence

  1. Uncertainty-Aware Few-Shot Image Classification 

    June 9, 2021

    Few-shot image classification aims to learn to recognize new categories from limited labelled data. Recently, metric learning based approaches have been widely investigated which classify a query sample by finding the nearest prototype from the support set based on the feature similarities. For few-shot classification,…

  2. MusicBERT: Symbolic Music Understanding with Large-Scale Pre-Training 

    June 9, 2021

    Symbolic music understanding, which refers to the understanding of music from the symbolic data (e.g., MIDI format, but not audio), covers many music applications such as genre classification, emotion classification, and music pieces matching. While good music representations are beneficial for these applications, the lack…

  3. Probabilistic Tracklet Scoring and Inpainting for Multiple Object Tracking 

    June 6, 2021

    Despite the recent advances in multiple object tracking (MOT), achieved by joint detection and tracking, dealing with long occlusions remains a challenge. This is due to the fact that such techniques tend to ignore the long-term motion information. In this paper, we introduce a probabilistic…

  4. Targeted Adversarial Training for Natural Language Understanding 

    June 6, 2021

    We present a simple yet effective Targeted Adversarial Training (TAT) algorithm to improve adversarial training for natural language understanding. The key idea is to introspect current mistakes and prioritize adversarial training steps to where the model errs the most. Experiments show that TAT can significantly…

  5. Template-Based Named Entity Recognition Using BART 

    June 2, 2021

    There is a recent interest in investigating few-shot NER, where the low-resource target domain has different label sets compared with a resource-rich source domain. Existing methods use a similarity-based metric. However, they cannot make full use of knowledge transfer in NER model parameters. To address…

  6. Unsupervised Pre-training for Person Re-identification 

    June 1, 2021

    In this paper, we present a large scale unlabeled person re-identification (Re-ID) dataset "LUPerson" and make the first attempt of performing unsupervised pre-training for improving the generalization ability of the learned person Re-ID feature representation. This is to address the problem that all existing person…

  7. LLC: Accurate, Multi-purpose Learnt Low-dimensional Binary Codes. 

    June 1, 2021

    Learning binary representations of instances and classes is a classical problem with several high potential applications. In modern settings, the compression of high-dimensional neural representations to low-dimensional binary codes is a challenging task and often require large bit-codes to be accurate. In this work, we…

  8. Use of Formal Ethical Reviews in NLP Literature: Historical Trends and Current Practices 

    June 1, 2021 | Sebastin Santy, Anku Rani, and Monojit Choudhury

    Ethical aspects of research in language technologies have received much attention recently. It is a standard practice to get a study involving human subjects reviewed and approved by a professional ethics committee/board of the institution. How commonly do we see mention of ethical approvals in…

  9. Noisy Self-Knowledge Distillation for Text Summarization 

    June 1, 2021 | Yang Liu, Sheng Shen, and Mirella Lapata

    In this paper we apply self-knowledge distillation to text summarization which we argue can alleviate problems with maximum-likelihood training on single reference and noisy datasets. Instead of relying on one-hot annotation labels, our student summarization model is trained with guidance from a teacher which generates…