News & features
Research Focus: Week of March 27, 2023
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. Machine translation (MT) models are designed to learn from large amounts of data…
In the news | VentureBeat
Microsoft’s Project Alexandria parses documents using unsupervised learning
In 2014, Microsoft launched Project Alexandria, a research effort within its Cambridge research division dedicated to discovering entities — topics of information — and their associated properties. Building on the research lab’s work in knowledge mining research using probabilistic programming,…
Designer-centered reinforcement learning
| Batu Aytemiz, Mikhail Jacob, Sam Devlin, and Katja Hofmann
In video games, nonplayer characters, bots, and other game agents help bring a digital world and its story to life. They can help make the mission of saving humanity feel urgent, transform every turn of a corner into a gamer’s…
MineRL sample-efficient reinforcement learning challenge—back for a second year—benefits organizers, as well as larger research community
| Noboru Sean Kuno
To unearth a diamond in the block-based open world of Minecraft requires the acquisition of materials and the construction of tools before any diamond mining can even begin. Players need to gather wood, which they’ll use to make a wood…
Three new reinforcement learning methods aim to improve AI in gaming and beyond
| Kamil Ciosek, Sam Devlin, and Katja Hofmann
Reinforcement learning (RL) provides exciting opportunities for game development, as highlighted in our recently announced Project Paidia (opens in new tab)—a research collaboration between our Game Intelligence (opens in new tab) group at Microsoft Research Cambridge and game developer Ninja…
In the news | Microsoft Innovation Stories
Exploring Project Paidia
Non-player characters are the heart and soul of many video games, and new AI technology lets developers create characters that act organically and respond naturally to the player. The Project Paidia team, in collaboration with game developer Ninja Theory, is…
In the news | Microsoft Azure Blog
Supercharge your games with Azure AI and reinforcement learning
Azure offers a full range of AI solutions to help you build, run and grow your games. AI and machine learning can help accelerate game development by providing more realistic worlds and challenges as well as support automation and live…
Microsoft Research EMEA and Latin America PhD Awards springboard new ideas across intercontinental research
| Clare Morgan
The 2020 EMEA and Latin America PhD Award recipients are undertaking research central to advancing today’s technology—training artificial agents to learn faster in new situations, designing new scalable machine learning algorithms for continual and federated learning, and several other compelling…
The road less traveled: With Successor Uncertainties, RL agents become better informed explorers
| Sebastian Tschiatschek and Katja Hofmann
Imagine moving to a new city. You want to get from your new home to your new job. Unfamiliar with the area, you ask your co-workers for the best route, and as far as you can tell … they’re right!…
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Dave Bignell
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