{"id":1116780,"date":"2025-01-17T09:37:58","date_gmt":"2025-01-17T17:37:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/?p=1116780"},"modified":"2025-01-17T09:38:05","modified_gmt":"2025-01-17T17:38:05","slug":"research-focus-week-of-january-13-2025","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/blog\/research-focus-week-of-january-13-2025\/","title":{"rendered":"Research Focus: Week of January 13, 2025"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
In this edition:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n NEW RESEARCH<\/p>\n\n\n\n Two of the transformative tools that play a central role in Microsoft\u2019s work on AI for science are MatterGen and MatterSim. In the world of materials discovery, each plays a distinct yet complementary role in reshaping how researchers design and validate new materials.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Distributed training enables multiple parties to jointly train a machine learning model on their respective datasets, which can help address the challenges posed by requirements in modern machine learning for large volumes of diverse data. However, this can raise security and privacy issues \u2013 protecting each party\u2019s data during<\/em> training and preventing leakage of private information from the model after<\/em> training through various inference attacks. <\/p>\n\n\n\n In a recent paper, Communication Efficient Secure and Private Multi-Party Deep Learning<\/a>, researchers from Microsoft address these concerns simultaneously by designing efficient Differentially Private, secure Multiparty Computation (DP-MPC) protocols for jointly training a model on data distributed among multiple parties. This DP-MPC protocol in the two-party setting is 56-to-794 times more communication-efficient and 16-to-182 times faster than previous such protocols. This work simplifies and improves on previous attempts to combine techniques from secure multiparty computation and differential privacy, especially in the context of training machine learning models. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Training and evaluating retrieval systems requires significant relevance judgments, which are traditionally collected from human assessors. This process is both costly and time-consuming. Large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in generating relevance labels for search tasks, offering a potential alternative to manual assessments. Current approaches often rely on a single LLM. While effective, this approach can be expensive and prone to intra-model biases that can favor systems leveraging similar models.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In a recent paper: JudgeBlender: Ensembling Judgments for Automatic Relevance Assessment<\/a>, researchers from Microsoft we introduce a framework that employs smaller, open-source models to provide relevance judgments by combining evaluations across multiple LLMs (LLMBlender) or multiple prompts (PromptBlender). By leveraging the LLMJudge benchmark, they compare JudgeBlender with state-of-the-art methods and the top performers in the LLMJudge challenge. This research shows that JudgeBlender achieves competitive performance, demonstrating that very large models are often unnecessary for reliable relevance assessments.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Congestion games are used to describe the behavior of agents who share a set of resources. Each player chooses a combination of resources, which may become congested, decreasing utility for the players who choose them. Players can avoid congestion by choosing combinations that are less popular. This is useful for modeling a range of real-world scenarios, such as traffic flow, data routing, and wireless communication networks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In a recent paper: Convergence to Equilibrium of No-regret Dynamics in Congestion Games<\/a>; researchers from Microsoft and external colleagues propose CongestEXP, a decentralized algorithm based on the classic exponential weights method. They evaluate CongestEXP in a traffic congestion game setting. As more drivers use a particular route, congestion increases, leading to higher travel times and lower utility. Players can choose a different route every day to optimize their utility, but the observed utility by each player may be subject to randomness due to uncertainty (e.g., bad weather). The researchers show that this approach provides both regret guarantees and convergence to Nash Equilibrium, where no player can unilaterally improve their outcome by changing their strategy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Research and development (R&D) plays a pivotal role in boosting industrial productivity. However, the rapid advance of AI has exposed the limitations of traditional R&D automation. Current methods often lack the intelligence needed to support innovative research and complex development tasks, underperforming human experts with deep knowledge.<\/p>\n\n\n\n LLMs trained on vast datasets spanning many subjects are equipped with extensive knowledge and reasoning capabilities that support complex decision-making in diverse workflows. By autonomously performing tasks and analyzing data, LLMs can significantly increase the efficiency and precision of R&D processes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n
<\/figure>\n\n\n\n
AI meets materials discovery<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
\n\n\n\nNEW RESEARCH<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Communication Efficient Secure and Private Multi-Party Deep Learning<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
\n<\/div>\n\n\n\nNEW RESEARCH<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
JudgeBlender: Ensembling Judgments for Automatic Relevance Assessment<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
\n<\/div>\n\n\n\nNEW RESEARCH<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Convergence to Equilibrium of No-regret Dynamics in Congestion Games<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
\n<\/div>\n\n\n\nNEW RESEARCH<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
RD-Agent: An open-source solution for smarter R&D<\/h3>\n\n\n\n