Microsoft Research Blog

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  1. Trade-offs in Ensembling, Merging and Routing Among Parameter-Efficient Experts 

    March 3, 2026

    While large language models (LLMs) fine-tuned with lightweight adapters achieve strong performance across diverse tasks, their performance on individual tasks depends on the fine-tuning strategy. Fusing independently trained models with different strengths has shown promise for multi-task learning through three main strategies: ensembling, which combines…

  2. Contextualized Privacy Defense for LLM Agents 

    March 3, 2026

    LLM agents increasingly act on users'personal information, yet existing privacy defenses remain limited in both design and adaptability. Most prior approaches rely on static or passive defenses, such as prompting and guarding. These paradigms are insufficient for supporting contextual, proactive privacy decisions in multi-step agent…

  3. Beyond Swahili: Designing Inclusive AI for Bantu Languages 

    March 2, 2026 | Alfred Malengo Kondoro

    Swahili has become one of the most consistently represented African languages in modern AI benchmarks, spanning machine translation, language modeling, and multilingual evaluation suites, far exceeding the coverage of any other Bantu language. This prominence reflects its scale, standardization, and regional reach, but it also…

  4. CARE: Towards Clinical Accountability in Multi-Modal Medical Reasoning with an Evidence-Grounded Agentic Framework 

    March 2, 2026

    Large visual language models (VLMs) have shown strong multi-modal medical reasoning ability, but most operate as end-to-end black boxes, diverging from clinicians'evidence-based, staged workflows and hindering clinical accountability. Complementarily, expert visual grounding models can accurately localize regions of interest (ROIs), providing explicit, reliable evidence that…

  5. Learning to Draft: Adaptive Speculative Decoding with Reinforcement Learning 

    March 2, 2026

    Speculative decoding accelerates large language model (LLM) inference by using a small draft model to generate candidate tokens for a larger target model to verify. The efficacy of this technique hinges on the trade-off between the time spent on drafting candidates and verifying them. However,…

  6. Reasoning as Gradient: Scaling MLE Agents Beyond Tree Search 

    March 2, 2026

    LLM-based agents for machine learning engineering (MLE) predominantly rely on tree search, a form of gradient-free optimization that uses scalar validation scores to rank candidates. As LLM reasoning capabilities improve, exhaustive enumeration becomes increasingly inefficient compared to directed updates, analogous to how accurate gradients enable…

  7. Advancing earth observation through machine learning: A TorchGeo tutorial 

    March 1, 2026

    Earth observation machine learning pipelines differ fundamentally from standard computer vision workflows. Imagery is typically delivered as large, georeferenced scenes, labels may be raster masks or vector geometries in distinct coordinate reference systems, and both training and evaluation often require spatially aware sampling and splitting…

  8. From pixels to patches: Pooling strategies for earth embeddings 

    March 1, 2026 | Isaac Corley, Caleb Robinson, Inbal Becker-Reshef, and Juan M. Lavista Ferres

    As geospatial foundation models shift from patch-level to pixel-level embeddings, practitioners must aggregate thousands of pixel vectors into patch representations that preserve class-discriminative signal while matching downstream label resolution. The default choice, mean pooling, discards within-patch variability and can reduce accuracy by more than 10%…