Awards | Optica
Francesca Parmigiani elected as a 2026 Optica Fellow
Fellows are Optica members who have served with distinction in the advancement of optics and photonics. Francesca was elected for her pioneering contributions to the field of high-speed optical communications and optical signal processing.
Fara-7B: An Efficient Agentic Model for Computer Use
| Ahmed Awadallah, Akshay Nambi, Alexey Taymanov, Aravind Rajeswaran, Corby Rosset, Hussein Mozannar, Spencer Whitehead, Vibhav Vineet, Yash Lara, Yash Pandya, and Andrew Zhao
Fara-7B is our first agentic small language model for computer use. This experimental model includes robust safety measures to aid responsible deployment. Despite its size, Fara-7B holds its own against larger, more resource-intensive agentic systems.
In the news | Venture Beat
Microsoft’s Fara-7B is a computer-use AI agent that rivals GPT-4o and works directly on your PC
Microsoft has introduced Fara-7B, a new 7-billion parameter model designed to act as a Computer Use Agent (CUA) capable of performing complex tasks directly on a user’s device. Fara-7B sets new state-of-the-art results for its size, providing a way to…
AI assistants, designed to perform actions on behalf of users, may not be as capable as current benchmarks suggest. New research reveals that existing tests for UI grounding—the ability of assistants to locate elements in the graphical user interface (GUI)—have…
In the news | Github Blog
Evolving GitHub Copilot’s next edit suggestions through custom model training
Editing code often involves a series of small but necessary changes ranging from refactors to fixes to cleanup and edge-case handling. In February, we launched next edit suggestions (NES), a custom Copilot (opens in new tab) model that predicts the next logical edit…
NeurIPS上新 | 大模型架构与加速：铸就LLMs效率与规模的基石
编者按：欢迎阅读“科研上新”栏目！“科研上新”汇聚了微软亚洲研究院最新的创新成果与科研动态。在这里，你可以快速浏览研究院的亮点资讯，保持对前沿领域的敏锐嗅觉。 全球顶级人工智能盛会 NeurIPS 2025 即将拉开帷幕。在本届大会上，微软亚洲研究院共有30多篇论文被接收。这些研究涉及从大模型基础理论到前沿应用的各个方面。 在接下来的几周里，我们将通过四期“NeurIPS上新”，深入解读入选的研究...
In the news | Github Blog
How we’re making GitHub Copilot smarter with fewer tools
In VS Code, GitHub Copilot Chat can access hundreds of tools through the Model Context Protocol (MCP) that range from codebase analysis tools to Azure-specific utilities. But giving an agent too many tools doesn’t always make it smarter. Sometimes it just makes…
VASA-3D：一张照片，开启3D讲话头像的无限可能
编者按：在虚拟数字人技术飞速发展的今天，如何让 3D 头像拥有真实感与表现力，始终是计算机视觉与图形学领域的核心挑战之一。微软亚洲研究院最新提出的 VASA-3D 技术，实现了从单张肖像照片生成可实时驱动的逼真的 3D 说话头像，不仅突破了传统方法对多视角数据的依赖，更将情绪表现力和面部微表情细腻度提升至全新高度。该工作已被 NeurIPS 2025 接收。 从视频会议中的虚拟形象，到元宇宙里的数...
Computer-use agents are AI systems that autonomously navigate and interact with software applications through graphical user interfaces (GUIs), and they are emerging as a new capability in artificial intelligence. By navigating and manipulating the same visual interfaces that people use,…