News & features

Less pain, more gain: A simple method for VAE training with less of that KL-vanishing agony
| Chunyuan Li
There is a growing interest in exploring the use of variational auto-encoders (VAE), a deep latent variable model, for text generation. Compared to the standard RNN-based language model that generates sentences one word at a time without the explicit guidance…

Towards universal language embeddings
| Jianfeng Gao
Language embedding is a process of mapping symbolic natural language text (for example, words, phrases and sentences) to semantic vector representations. This is fundamental to deep learning approaches to natural language understanding (NLU). It is highly desirable to learn language…

Getting efficient with “What-happens-if …”
| Adith Swaminathan and Emre Kiciman
Causal inference studies the relationship between causes and effects. For example, one kind of question that causal inference can answer is the “What-happens-if …” question. What happens if I take a specific medication? What happens if I raise the price…
In the news | ZDNet
Google Brain, Microsoft plumb the mysteries of networks with AI
Some heavy hitters in AI report breakthroughs in getting neural networks to decipher hidden structure of social networks such as Reddit.

Making intelligence intelligible with Dr. Rich Caruana
Episode 26, May 30, 2018 – Dr. Rich Caruana talks about how the rise of deep neural networks has made understanding machine predictions more difficult for humans, and discusses an interesting class of smaller, more interpretable models that may help…

Neural Program Synthesis and the Quest to Democratize Programming with Dr. Rishabh Singh
Episode 10, January 31, 2018 – We can program computers to do almost anything. But what about programming computers to… program computers? That’s a task that Dr. Rishabh Singh, and the team in the Cognition group at Microsoft Research, are…

‘Contextual bandit’ breakthrough enables deeper personalization
| Miro Dudík
News portals that simultaneously personalize every part of the landing page for every visitor and mobile health apps that adaptively tweak every part of an exercise regimen to maximize the benefit of every user are becoming plausible due to an…

Transfer learning for machine reading comprehension
By Xiaodong He, Principal Researcher, Microsoft Research For human beings, reading comprehension is a basic task, performed daily. As early as in elementary school, we can read an article, and answer questions about its key ideas and details. But for…
In the news | Forbes
Microsoft’s Spooky New Bot Can Automatically Caption Your Photos – Sometimes
Microsoft’s CaptionBot uses computer vision and natural language processing to describe any photo, just as a human would.