Microsoft Research blog
Research Focus: Week of September 23, 2024
Welcome to Research Focus, a series of blog posts that highlights notable publications, events, code/datasets, new hires and other milestones from across the research community at Microsoft. Time-series forecasting is a technique used to predict future values based on previously…
Research Focus: Week of July 29, 2024
In this issue: Skeleton Posterior-guided OpTimization (SPOT) exhibits potential in various causal discovery tasks; Using visual imagery for an EEG-based brain–computer interface; Developing human-centered AI systems to assist creative professionals.
Research Focus: Week of April 15, 2024
In this issue: New research on appropriate reliance on generative AI; Power management opportunities for LLMs in the cloud; LLMLingua-2 improves task-agnostic prompt compression; Enhancing COMET to embrace under-resourced African languages:
Improving LLM understanding of structured data and exploring advanced prompting methods
| Mengyu Zhou
Structural Understanding Capabilities is a new benchmark for evaluating and improving LLM comprehension of structured table data. This advance can help LLMs process and analyze data more effectively, broadening their applicability in real-world tasks.
TaskWeaver: A code-first agent framework for efficient data analytics and domain adaptation
| Shilin He, Liqun Li, Xu Zhang, Bo Qiao, Chaoyun Zhang, Yu Kang, Rujia Wang, Qingwei Lin 林庆维, Saravan Rajmohan, and Dongmei Zhang
AI-backed virtual assistants face challenges in handling complex data structures. TaskWeaver helps users build assistants that understand diverse domain questions, follow examples, and efficiently execute customizable algorithms on complex data structures.
Research Focus: Week of December 18, 2023
In this issue of Research Focus: Optimized exit-augmented models for scalable efficient inference; NeurIPS LLM Efficiency Challenge; LLM-empowered automated data exploration; Boosting cloud efficiency with data-driven decision-making and optimization.
Incorporating chemists’ insight with AI models for single-step retrosynthesis prediction
| Lei Fang, Junren Li, Zhao Ming, Li Tan, and Jian-Guang Lou
Retrosynthesis analysis is a critical task in organic chemistry and central to many important industries. It primarily involves decomposing a target molecule into commercially available molecules step by step. Since synthesis strategies can be quite diverse and strategic, retrosynthesis planning…
Research Focus: Week of November 28, 2022
This special edition of Research Focus highlights some of the 100+ papers from Microsoft Research that were accepted for publication at NeurIPS 2022 – the thirty-sixth annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems. Dongkuan Xu, Subhabrata Mukherjee, Xiaodong Liu, Debadeepta Dey,…
Innovation by (and beyond) the numbers: A history of research collaborations in Excel
Microsoft Excel is one of the world’s most important software tools, relied upon by users worldwide to create, understand, model, predict, and collaborate. As the Excel team works to leverage new areas of computer science – advancements in programming languages, NLP,…