From raw interaction to reusable knowledge: Rethinking memory for AI agents
| Ke Yang, Michel Galley, Chenglong Wang, Jianfeng Gao, Jiawei Han, and ChengXiang Zhai
It seems counterintuitive: giving AI agents more memory can make them less effective. As interaction logs accumulate, they grow large, fill with irrelevant content, and become increasingly difficult to use. More memory means that agents must search through larger volumes of…
Phi-4-reasoning-vision and the lessons of training a multimodal reasoning model
| Jyoti Aneja, Michael Harrison, Neel Joshi, Tyler LaBonte, John Langford, and Eduardo Salinas
We are pleased to announce Phi-4-reasoning-vision-15B, a 15 billion parameter open‑weight multimodal reasoning model, available through Microsoft Foundry (opens in new tab), HuggingFace (opens in new tab) and GitHub (opens in new tab). Phi-4-reasoning-vision-15B is a broadly capable model that…
By Ben Finkelshtein (opens in new tab) (University of Oxford), Silviu Cucerzan, Sujay Kumar Jauhar, and Ryen W. White (Microsoft) Think about the last time you opened a shared document at work. Behind that simple action lies a complex network of relationships: the colleagues who edited the file…
The Shape of Things to Come
| Doug Burger
Technical advances are moving at such a rapid pace that it can be challenging to define the tomorrow we’re working toward. In The Shape of Things to Come, Microsoft research leader Doug Burger and experts from across disciplines tease out…
Trailer: The Shape of Things to Come
| Doug Burger
Microsoft research lead Doug Burger introduces his new podcast series, "The Shape of Things to Come", an exploration into the fundamental truths about AI and how the technology will reshape the future.
CORPGEN advances AI agents for real work
| Abubakarr Jaye, Nigel Boachie Kumankumah, Chidera Biringa, Anjel Patel, Dayquan Julienne, Tianwei Chen, and Sulaiman Vesal
By mid-morning, a typical knowledge worker is already juggling a client report, a budget spreadsheet, a slide deck, and an email backlog, all interdependent and all demanding attention at once. For AI agents to be genuinely useful in that environment,…
Awards | ACM SIGCHI
ACM SIGCHI Societal Impact Award
Jacki O’Neill, founding Lab Director of Microsoft Research Africa, Nairobi, was given the 2026 Societal Impact Award by ACM SIGCHI for her research in computer science which has had extensive societal impact specifically in the areas of financial inclusion, future…
Experiential Reinforcement Learning
By Taiwei Shi, Sihao Chen, Longqi Yang, Jaime Teevan Reinforcement Learning is at the core of building and improving frontier AI models and products. Yet most state-of-the-art RL methods learn primarily from outcomes: a scalar reward signal that says whether…
Media Authenticity Methods in Practice: Capabilities, Limitations, and Directions
| Eric Horvitz, Andrew Jenks, and Jessica Young
As synthetic media grows, verifying what’s real, and the origin of content, matters more than ever. Our latest report explores media integrity and authentication methods, their limits, and practical paths toward trustworthy provenance across images, audio, and video.