{"id":1029624,"date":"2024-05-02T09:50:43","date_gmt":"2024-05-02T16:50:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/?p=1029624"},"modified":"2024-05-03T07:30:51","modified_gmt":"2024-05-03T14:30:51","slug":"research-focus-week-of-april-29-2024","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/blog\/research-focus-week-of-april-29-2024\/","title":{"rendered":"Research Focus: Week of April 29, 2024"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

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.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

\"Research<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

NEW RESEARCH<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Can Large Language Models Transform Natural Language Intent into Formal Method Postconditions?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Informal natural language that describes code functionality, such as code comments or function documentation, may contain substantial information about a program\u2019s intent. However, there is no guarantee that a program\u2019s implementation aligns with its natural language documentation. In the case of a conflict, leveraging information in code-adjacent natural language has the potential to enhance fault localization, debugging, and code trustworthiness. However, this information is often underutilized, due to the inherent ambiguity of natural language which makes natural language intent challenging to check programmatically. The \u201cemergent abilities\u201d of large language models (LLMs) have the potential to facilitate the translation of natural language intent to programmatically checkable assertions. However, due to a lack of benchmarks and evaluation metrics, it is unclear if LLMs can correctly translate informal natural language specifications into formal specifications that match programmer intent\u2014and whether such translation could be useful in practice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In a new paper: Can Large Language Models Transform Natural Language Intent into Formal Method Postconditions?<\/a>, researchers from Microsoft describe nl2postcond, the problem leveraging LLMs for transforming informal natural language to formal method postconditions, expressed as program assertions. The paper, to be presented at the upcoming ACM International Conference on the Foundations of Software Engineering (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a>, <\/em><\/strong>introduces and validates metrics to measure and compare different nl2postcond approaches, using the correctness and discriminative power of generated postconditions. The researchers show that nl2postcond via LLMs has the potential to be helpful in practice by demonstrating that LLM-generated specifications can be used to discover historical bugs in real-world projects.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n
Read the paper<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
\n\n\n\n

NEW RESEARCH<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Semantically Aligned Question and Code Generation for Automated Insight Generation<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

People who work with data, like engineers, analysts, and data scientists, often must manually look through data to find valuable insights or write complex scripts to automate exploration of the data. Automated insight generation provides these workers the opportunity to immediately glean insights about their data and identify valuable starting places for writing their exploration scripts. Unfortunately, automated insights produced by LLMs can sometimes generate code that does not correctly correspond (or align) to the insight. In a recent paper: Semantically Aligned Question and Code Generation for Automated Insight Generation<\/a>, researchers from Microsoft leverage the semantic knowledge of LLMs to generate targeted and insightful questions about data and the corresponding code to answer those questions. Through an empirical study on data from Open-WikiTable (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a>, they then show that embeddings can be effectively used for filtering out semantically unaligned pairs of question and code. The research also shows that generating questions and code together yields more interesting and diverse insights about data.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n
Read the paper<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
\n\n\n\n

NEW RESEARCH<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Explaining CLIP’s performance disparities on data from blind\/low vision users<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

AI-based applications hold the potential to assist people who are blind or low vision (BLV) with everyday visual tasks. However, human assistance is often required, due to the wide variety of assistance needed and varying quality of images available. Recent advances in large multi-modal models (LMMs) could potentially address these challenges, enabling a new era of automated visual assistance. Yet, little work has been done to evaluate how well LMMs perform on data from BLV users.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In a recent paper: Explaining CLIP’s performance disparities on data from blind\/low vision users<\/a>, researchers from Microsoft and the World Bank address this issue by assessing CLIP (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a>, a widely-used LMM with potential to underpin many assistive technologies. Testing 25 CLIP variants in a zero-shot classification task, their results show that disability objects, like guide canes and Braille displays, are recognized significantly less accurately than common objects, like TV remote controls and coffee mugs\u2014in some cases by up to 28 percentage points difference.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The researchers perform an analysis of the captions in three large-scale datasets that are commonly used to train models like CLIP and show that BLV-related content (such as guide canes) is rarely mentioned. This is a potential reason for the large performance gaps. The researchers show that a few-shot learning approach with as little as five example images of a disability object can improve its ability to recognize that object, holding the potential to mitigate CLIP\u2019s performance disparities for BLV users. They then discuss other possible mitigations.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n
Read the paper<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n\t
\n\t\t\n\n\t\t

\n\t\tSpotlight: Microsoft research newsletter<\/span>\n\t<\/p>\n\t\n\t

\n\t\t\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\"\"\n\t\t\t\t<\/a>\n\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\t
\n\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t

Microsoft Research Newsletter<\/h2>\n\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t

Stay connected to the research community at Microsoft.<\/p>\n\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t

\n\t\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\tSubscribe today\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/a>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t<\/div>\n\t<\/div>\n\t\n\n\n

NEW RESEARCH<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Closed-Form Bounds for DP-SGD against Record-level Inference <\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Privacy of training data is a central consideration when deploying machine learning (ML) models. Models trained with guarantees of differential privacy (DP) provably resist a wide range of attacks. Although it is possible to derive bounds, or safe limits, for specific privacy threats solely from DP guarantees, meaningful bounds require impractically small privacy budgets, which results in a large loss in utility.
\u00a0
In a recent paper: Closed-Form Bounds for DP-SGD against Record-level Inference<\/a>, researchers from Microsoft present a new approach to quantify the privacy of ML models against membership inference<\/strong> (inferring whether a data record is in the training data) and attribute inference<\/strong> (reconstructing partial information about a record) without the indirection through DP. They focus on the popular DP-SGD algorithm, which they model as an information theoretic channel whose inputs are the secrets that an attacker wants to infer (e.g., membership of a data record) and whose outputs are the intermediate model parameters produced by iterative optimization. They obtain closed-form bounds for membership inference that match state-of-the-art techniques but are orders of magnitude faster to compute. They also present the first algorithm to produce data-dependent bounds against attribute inference. Compared to bounds computed indirectly through numerical DP budget accountants, these bounds provide a tighter characterization of the privacy risk of deploying an ML model trained on a specific dataset. This research provides a direct, interpretable, and practical way to evaluate the privacy of trained models against inference threats without sacrificing utility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n
Read the paper<\/a><\/div>\n\n\n\n
Get the code<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
\n\t\n\t
\n\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t<\/div>\n\n\t<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In this edition: Can LLMs transform natural language into formal method postconditions; Semantically aligned question + code generation for automated insight generation; Explaining CLIP performance disparities on blind\/low vision data; plus recent news.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":42735,"featured_media":1029753,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"msr-url-field":"","msr-podcast-episode":"","msrModifiedDate":"","msrModifiedDateEnabled":false,"ep_exclude_from_search":false,"_classifai_error":"","msr-author-ordering":[{"type":"user_nicename","value":"Sarah Fakhoury","user_id":"42180"},{"type":"user_nicename","value":"Saikat Chakraborty","user_id":"42411"},{"type":"user_nicename","value":"Shuvendu Lahiri","user_id":"33640"},{"type":"user_nicename","value":"Anirudh Khatry","user_id":"42795"},{"type":"user_nicename","value":"Sumit Gulwani","user_id":"33755"},{"type":"user_nicename","value":"Vu Le","user_id":"39174"},{"type":"user_nicename","value":"Chris Parnin","user_id":"41985"},{"type":"user_nicename","value":"Mukul Singh","user_id":"42048"},{"type":"user_nicename","value":"Gust Verbruggen","user_id":"41605"},{"type":"user_nicename","value":"Daniela Massiceti","user_id":"40408"},{"type":"user_nicename","value":"Camilla Longden","user_id":"36311"},{"type":"user_nicename","value":"Agnieszka Slowik","user_id":"42534"},{"type":"user_nicename","value":"Martin Grayson","user_id":"32893"},{"type":"user_nicename","value":"Cecily Morrison","user_id":"31356"},{"type":"user_nicename","value":"Giovanni Cherubin","user_id":"41410"},{"type":"user_nicename","value":"Andrew Paverd","user_id":"37902"},{"type":"user_nicename","value":"Boris Köpf","user_id":"37857"},{"type":"user_nicename","value":"Shruti Tople","user_id":"39003"},{"type":"user_nicename","value":"Lukas Wutschitz","user_id":"38775"},{"type":"user_nicename","value":"Santiago Zanella-B\u00e9guelin","user_id":"33518"}],"msr_hide_image_in_river":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"research-area":[13556,13562,13554,13560,13558],"msr-region":[],"msr-event-type":[],"msr-locale":[268875],"msr-post-option":[243984],"msr-impact-theme":[],"msr-promo-type":[],"msr-podcast-series":[],"class_list":["post-1029624","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-research-blog","msr-research-area-artificial-intelligence","msr-research-area-computer-vision","msr-research-area-human-computer-interaction","msr-research-area-programming-languages-software-engineering","msr-research-area-security-privacy-cryptography","msr-locale-en_us","msr-post-option-blog-homepage-featured"],"msr_event_details":{"start":"","end":"","location":""},"podcast_url":"","podcast_episode":"","msr_research_lab":[199561,199565],"msr_impact_theme":[],"related-publications":[],"related-downloads":[],"related-videos":[],"related-academic-programs":[],"related-groups":[144812,559983,663303,793670,998211,1142579],"related-projects":[890049,830104,648207],"related-events":[],"related-researchers":[{"type":"user_nicename","value":"Sarah Fakhoury","user_id":42180,"display_name":"Sarah Fakhoury","author_link":"Sarah Fakhoury<\/a>","is_active":false,"last_first":"Fakhoury, Sarah","people_section":0,"alias":"sfakhoury"},{"type":"user_nicename","value":"Saikat Chakraborty","user_id":42411,"display_name":"Saikat Chakraborty","author_link":"Saikat Chakraborty<\/a>","is_active":false,"last_first":"Chakraborty, Saikat","people_section":0,"alias":"saikatc"},{"type":"user_nicename","value":"Shuvendu Lahiri","user_id":33640,"display_name":"Shuvendu Lahiri","author_link":"Shuvendu Lahiri<\/a>","is_active":false,"last_first":"Lahiri, Shuvendu","people_section":0,"alias":"shuvendu"},{"type":"user_nicename","value":"Sumit Gulwani","user_id":33755,"display_name":"Sumit Gulwani","author_link":"Sumit Gulwani<\/a>","is_active":false,"last_first":"Gulwani, Sumit","people_section":0,"alias":"sumitg"},{"type":"user_nicename","value":"Vu Le","user_id":39174,"display_name":"Vu Le","author_link":"Vu Le<\/a>","is_active":false,"last_first":"Le, Vu","people_section":0,"alias":"levu"},{"type":"user_nicename","value":"Chris Parnin","user_id":41985,"display_name":"Chris Parnin","author_link":"Chris Parnin<\/a>","is_active":false,"last_first":"Parnin, Chris","people_section":0,"alias":"chrisparnin"},{"type":"user_nicename","value":"Mukul Singh","user_id":42048,"display_name":"Mukul Singh","author_link":"Mukul Singh<\/a>","is_active":false,"last_first":"Singh, Mukul","people_section":0,"alias":"singhmukul"},{"type":"user_nicename","value":"Gust Verbruggen","user_id":41605,"display_name":"Gust Verbruggen","author_link":"Gust Verbruggen<\/a>","is_active":false,"last_first":"Verbruggen, Gust","people_section":0,"alias":"gverbruggen"},{"type":"user_nicename","value":"Camilla Longden","user_id":36311,"display_name":"Camilla Longden","author_link":"Camilla Longden<\/a>","is_active":false,"last_first":"Longden, Camilla","people_section":0,"alias":"calongde"},{"type":"user_nicename","value":"Martin Grayson","user_id":32893,"display_name":"Martin Grayson","author_link":"Martin Grayson<\/a>","is_active":false,"last_first":"Grayson, Martin","people_section":0,"alias":"mgrayson"},{"type":"user_nicename","value":"Cecily Morrison","user_id":31356,"display_name":"Cecily Morrison","author_link":"Cecily Morrison<\/a>","is_active":false,"last_first":"Morrison, Cecily","people_section":0,"alias":"cecilym"},{"type":"user_nicename","value":"Giovanni Cherubin","user_id":41410,"display_name":"Giovanni Cherubin","author_link":"Giovanni Cherubin<\/a>","is_active":false,"last_first":"Cherubin, Giovanni","people_section":0,"alias":"gcherubin"},{"type":"user_nicename","value":"Andrew Paverd","user_id":37902,"display_name":"Andrew Paverd","author_link":"Andrew Paverd<\/a>","is_active":false,"last_first":"Paverd, Andrew","people_section":0,"alias":"anpaverd"},{"type":"user_nicename","value":"Boris Köpf","user_id":37857,"display_name":"Boris Köpf","author_link":"Boris Köpf<\/a>","is_active":false,"last_first":"K\u00f6pf, Boris","people_section":0,"alias":"bokoepf"},{"type":"user_nicename","value":"Shruti Tople","user_id":39003,"display_name":"Shruti Tople","author_link":"Shruti Tople<\/a>","is_active":false,"last_first":"Tople, Shruti","people_section":0,"alias":"shtople"},{"type":"user_nicename","value":"Lukas Wutschitz","user_id":38775,"display_name":"Lukas Wutschitz","author_link":"Lukas Wutschitz<\/a>","is_active":false,"last_first":"Wutschitz, Lukas","people_section":0,"alias":"luwutsch"},{"type":"user_nicename","value":"Santiago Zanella-B\u00e9guelin","user_id":33518,"display_name":"Santiago Zanella-B\u00e9guelin","author_link":"Santiago Zanella-B\u00e9guelin<\/a>","is_active":false,"last_first":"Zanella-B\u00e9guelin, Santiago","people_section":0,"alias":"santiago"}],"msr_type":"Post","featured_image_thumbnail":"\"Research","byline":"","formattedDate":"May 2, 2024","formattedExcerpt":"In this edition: Can LLMs transform natural language into formal method postconditions; Semantically aligned question + code generation for automated insight generation; Explaining CLIP performance disparities on blind\/low vision data; plus recent news.","locale":{"slug":"en_us","name":"English","native":"","english":"English"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1029624","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/42735"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1029624"}],"version-history":[{"count":17,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1029624\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1030812,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1029624\/revisions\/1030812"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1029753"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1029624"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1029624"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1029624"},{"taxonomy":"msr-research-area","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/research-area?post=1029624"},{"taxonomy":"msr-region","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-region?post=1029624"},{"taxonomy":"msr-event-type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-event-type?post=1029624"},{"taxonomy":"msr-locale","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-locale?post=1029624"},{"taxonomy":"msr-post-option","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-post-option?post=1029624"},{"taxonomy":"msr-impact-theme","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-impact-theme?post=1029624"},{"taxonomy":"msr-promo-type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-promo-type?post=1029624"},{"taxonomy":"msr-podcast-series","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-podcast-series?post=1029624"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}