Microsoft Research Blog

Artificial intelligence

  1. Causal Contextual Prediction for Learned Image Compression 

    January 1, 2021 | Zongyu Guo, Zhizheng Zhang, Runsen Feng, and Zhibo Chen

    Over the past several years, we have witnessed impressive progress in the field of learned image compression. Recent learned image codecs are commonly based on autoencoders, that first encode an image into low-dimensional latent representations and then decode them for reconstruction purposes. To capture spatial…

  2. Reader-Guided Passage Reranking for Open-Domain Question Answering 

    December 31, 2020

    Current open-domain question answering (QA) systems often follow a Retriever-Reader (R2) architecture, where the retriever first retrieves relevant passages and the reader then reads the retrieved passages to form an answer. In this paper, we propose a simple and effective passage reranking method, Reader-guIDEd Reranker…

  3. Polyjuice: Generating Counterfactuals for Explaining, Evaluating, and Improving Models 

    December 31, 2020 | Tongshuang Wu, Marco Tulio Ribeiro, Jeffrey Heer, and Daniel S. Weld

    While counterfactual examples are useful for analysis and training of NLP models, current generation methods either rely on manual labor to create very few counterfactuals, or only instantiate limited types of perturbations such as paraphrases or word substitutions. We present Polyjuice, a general-purpose counterfactual generator…

  4. UnitedQA: A Hybrid Approach for Open Domain Question Answering 

    December 31, 2020

    To date, most of recent work under the retrieval-reader framework for open-domain QA focuses on either extractive or generative reader exclusively. In this paper, we study a hybrid approach for leveraging the strengths of both models. We apply novel techniques to enhance both extractive and…

  5. A Deep Active Learning System for Species Identification and Counting in Camera Trap Images 

    December 31, 2020

    A typical camera trap survey may produce millions of images that require slow, expensive manual review. Consequently, critical conservation questions may be answered too slowly to support decision‐making. Recent studies demonstrated the potential for computer vision to dramatically increase efficiency in image‐based biodiversity surveys; however,…

  6. Syntax-Enhanced Pre-trained Model 

    December 27, 2020

    We study the problem of leveraging the syntactic structure of text to enhance pre-trained models such as BERT and RoBERTa. Existing methods utilize syntax of text either in the pre-training stage or in the fine-tuning stage, so that they suffer from discrepancy between the two…

  7. Self-supervised Pre-training with Hard Examples Improves Visual Representations. 

    December 24, 2020

    Self-supervised pre-training (SSP) employs random image transformations to generate training data for visual representation learning. In this paper, we first present a modeling framework that unifies existing SSP methods as learning to predict pseudo-labels. Then, we propose new data augmentation methods of generating training examples…

  8. Global Context Networks 

    December 24, 2020

    The Non-Local Network (NLNet) presents a pioneering approach for capturing long-range dependencies within an image, via aggregating query-specific global context to each query position. However, through a rigorous empirical analysis, we have found that the global contexts modeled by the non-local network are almost the…