Microsoft Research Blog

Artificial intelligence

  1. Not only what, but also when: Understanding Brazilian political comments on legislative bills over time through Stance Detection and Topic Modeling 

    May 23, 2025 | Matheus Cerqueira

    Legislative public spaces are important structures for participatory democracy, allowing citizens’ voices to get engaged with politic decisions. As a consequence of the popularization of information and communication technologies, internet based tools have played an important role to improve public participation in political decisions, known…

  3. Efficient Vocabulary-Free Fine-Grained Visual Recognition in the Age of Multimodal LLMs 

    May 2, 2025 | Hari Chandana Kuchibhotla, Sai Srinivas Kancheti, Abbavaram Gowtham Reddy, and Vineeth N Balasubramanian

    Fine-grained Visual Recognition (FGVR) involves distinguishing between visually similar categories, which is inherently challenging due to subtle inter-class differences and the need for large, expert-annotated datasets. In domains like medical imaging, such curated datasets are unavailable due to issues like privacy concerns and high annotation…

  6. Phi-4-reasoning Technical Report 

    April 30, 2025

    We introduce Phi-4-reasoning, a 14-billion parameter reasoning model that achieves strong performance on complex reasoning tasks. Trained via supervised fine-tuning of Phi-4 on carefully curated set of “teachable” prompts–selected for the right level of complexity and diversity–and reasoning demonstrations generated using o3-mini, Phi-4-reasoning generates detailed…

  8. Towards Neural Synthesis for SMT-Assisted Proof-Oriented Programming 

    April 29, 2025

    Proof-oriented programs mix computational content with proofs of program correctness. However, the human effort involved in programming and proving is still substantial, despite the use of Satisfiability Modulo Theories (SMT) solvers to automate proofs in languages such as F*. Seeking to spur research on using…

  9. SeCom: On Memory Construction and Retrieval for Personalized Conversational Agents 

    April 24, 2025

    To deliver coherent and personalized experiences in long-term conversations, existing approaches typically perform retrieval augmented response generation by constructing memory banks from conversation history at either the turn-level, session-level, or through summarization. In this paper, we present two key findings: (1) The granularity of memory…

  10. Agentic Reasoning and Tool Integration for LLMs via Reinforcement Learning 

    April 21, 2025 | Joykirat Singh, Raghav Magazine, Yash Pandya, and Akshay Nambi

    Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable progress in complex reasoning tasks, yet they remain fundamentally limited by their reliance on static internal knowledge and text-only reasoning. Real-world problem solving often demands dynamic, multi-step reasoning, adaptive decision making, and the ability to interact with external…

  11. New employee Copilot usage: Insights into productivity and socialization 

    April 21, 2025

    This report summarizes a mixed-methods study examining how a new generation of employees interacts with the generative AI assistant Microsoft Copilot for productivity when acclimating to a professional environment. Through a series of surveys, interviews, and a diary study, 125 Microsoft interns in a variety…