Microsoft Research Blog

Artificial intelligence

  1. Working Memory Graphs 

    July 1, 2020

    Transformers have increasingly outperformed gated RNNs in obtaining new state-of-the-art results on supervised tasks involving text sequences. Inspired by this trend, we study the question of how Transformer-based models can improve the performance of sequential decision-making agents. We present the Working Memory Graph (WMG), an…

  2. A Retrieve-and-Rewrite Initialization Method for Unsupervised Machine Translation 

    July 1, 2020

    The commonly used framework for unsupervised machine translation builds initial translation models of both translation directions, and then performs iterative back-translation to jointly boost their translation performance. The initialization stage is very important since bad initialization may wrongly squeeze the search space, and too much…

  3. Learning Calibratable Policies using Programmatic Style-Consistency 

    July 1, 2020

    We study the problem of controllable generation of long-term sequential behaviors. Solutions to this important problem would enable many applications, such as calibrating behaviors of AI agents in games or predicting player trajectories in sports. In contrast to the well-studied areas of controllable generation of…

  4. Policy Improvement from Multiple Experts 

    June 30, 2020 | Ching-An Cheng, Andrey Kolobov, and Alekh Agarwal

    Despite its promise, reinforcement learning's real-world adoption has been hampered by its need for costly exploration to learn a good policy. Imitation learning (IL) mitigates this shortcoming by using an expert policy during training as a bootstrap to accelerate the learning process. However, in many…

  5. A Machine Learning Approach to Understanding Patterns of Engagement With Internet-Delivered Mental Health Interventions. 

    June 30, 2020

    Importance  The mechanisms by which engagement with internet-delivered psychological interventions are associated with depression and anxiety symptoms are unclear. Objective  To identify behavior types based on how people engage with an internet-based cognitive behavioral therapy (iCBT) intervention for symptoms of depression and anxiety. Design, Setting, and Participants  Deidentified…

  6. A Recipe for Creating Multimodal Aligned Datasets for Sequential Tasks. 

    June 30, 2020

    Many high-level procedural tasks can be decomposed into sequences of instructions that vary in their order and choice of tools. In the cooking domain, the web offers many, partially-overlapping, text and video recipes (i.e. procedures) that describe how to make the same dish (i.e. high-level…

  7. On the Importance of Diversity in Question Generation for QA 

    June 30, 2020 | Arafat Sultan, Ramón Fernandez Astudillo, Vittorio Castelli, and Shubham Chandel

    Automatic question generation (QG) has shown promise as a source of synthetic training data for question answering (QA). In this paper we ask: Is textual diversity in QG beneficial for downstream QA? Using top-p nucleus sampling to derive samples from a transformer-based question generator, we…

  8. DeepMutation: a neural mutation tool 

    June 26, 2020

    Mutation testing can be used to assess the fault-detection capabilities of a given test suite. To this aim, two characteristics of mutation testing frameworks are of paramount importance: (i) they should generate mutants that are representative of real faults; and (ii) they should provide a…

  9. GLUECoS: An Evaluation Benchmark for Code-Switched NLP 

    June 25, 2020

    Code-switching is the use of more than one language in the same conversation or utterance. Recently, multilingual contextual embedding models, trained on multiple monolingual corpora, have shown promising results on cross-lingual and multilingual tasks. We present an evaluation benchmark, GLUECoS, for code-switched languages, that spans…

  10. Deep learning for prediction of the air quality response to emission changes 

    June 16, 2020

    Efficient prediction of the air quality response to emission changes is a prerequisite for an integrated assessment system in developing effective control policies. Yet, representing the nonlinear response of air quality to emission controls with accuracy remains a major barrier in air quality-related decision making.…

  11. Multi-scale Grouped Dense Network for VVC Intra Coding 

    June 14, 2020 | Xin Li, Simeng Sun, Zhizheng Zhang, and Zhibo Chen

    Versatile Video Coding (H.266/VVC) standard achieves better image quality when keeping the same bits than any other conventional image codec, such as BPG, JPEG, and etc. However, it is still attractive and challenging to improve the image quality with high compression ratio on the basis…

  12. Relation-Aware Global Attention for Person Re-Identification 

    June 14, 2020

    For person re-identification (re-id), attention mechanisms have become attractive as they aim at strengthening discriminative features and suppressing irrelevant ones, which matches well the key of re-id, i.e., discriminative feature learning. Previous approaches typically learn attention using local convolutions, ignoring the mining of knowledge from…