Microsoft Research Blog

Artificial intelligence

  1. Learning to Represent Action Values as a Hypergraph on the Action Vertices 

    May 2, 2021 | Arash Tavakoli, Mehdi Fatemi, and Petar Kormushev

    Action values are ubiquitous in reinforcement learning (RL) methods, with the sample complexity of such methods relying heavily on how fast a good estimator for action value can be learned. By viewing this problem through the lens of representation learning, good representations of both state…

  2. Searchable Hidden Intermediates for End-to-End Models of Decomposable Sequence Tasks 

    May 1, 2021

    End-to-end approaches for sequence tasks are becoming increasingly popular. Yet for complex sequence tasks, like speech translation, systems that cascade several models trained on sub-tasks have shown to be superior, suggesting that the compositionality of cascaded systems simplifies learning and enables sophisticated search capabilities. In…

  3. Active Contrastive Learning of Audio-Visual Video Representations 

    May 1, 2021 | Shuang Ma, Zhaoyang Zeng, Daniel McDuff, and Yale Song

    Contrastive learning has been shown to produce generalizable representations of audio and visual data by maximizing the lower bound on the mutual information (MI) between different views of an instance. However, obtaining a tight lower bound requires a sample size exponential in MI and thus…

  4. Joint Retrieval and Generation Training for Grounded Text Generation 

    May 1, 2021

    Recent advances in large-scale pre-training such as GPT-3 allow seemingly high quality text to be generated from a given prompt. However, such generation systems often suffer from problems of hallucinated facts, and are not inherently designed to incorporate useful external information. Grounded generation models appear…

  5. Constructing Taxonomies from Pretrained Language Models 

    April 18, 2021 | Catherine Chen, Kevin Lin, and Dan Klein

    We present a method for constructing taxonomic trees (e.g., WordNet) using pretrained language models. Our approach is composed of two modules, one that predicts parenthood relations and another that reconciles those predictions into trees. The parenthood prediction module produces likelihood scores for each potential parent-child…

  6. DIY: Assessing the Correctness of Natural Language to SQL Systems 

    April 17, 2021 | Arpit Narechania, Adam Fourney, Bongshin Lee, and Gonzalo Ramos

    Designing natural language interfaces for querying databases remains an important goal pursued by researchers in natural language processing, databases, and HCI. These systems receive natural language as input, translate it into a formal database query, and execute the query to compute a result. Because the…

  7. Generating Bug-Fixes Using Pretrained Transformers 

    April 15, 2021 | Dawn Drain, Chen Wu, Alexey Svyatkovskiy, and Neel Sundaresan

    Detecting and fixing bugs are two of the most important yet frustrating parts of the software development cycle. Existing bug detection tools are based mainly on static analyzers, which rely on mathematical logic and symbolic reasoning about the program execution to detect common types of…