Reinforcement learning (RL) has driven substantial progress in coding agents by relying on verified successful trajectories as learning signals. However, such trajectories are scarce in long-horizon software engineering tasks, where a minor error can invalidate the entire rollout. Repeatedly restarting from the initial...
Mengyang Liu, Wei-Ming Wang, Hai-Xin Nan et al.· 1 citation
Late-interaction (multi-vector) models represent documents using a set of token-level vectors, providing a middle ground between cross-encoders and dense encoders in terms of quality and cost of embedding. However, compared to the latter, the indices are costly to store and score. Pooling and pruning based compression...
Terminal agents solve tasks in software engineering and scientific research by executing commands in a terminal. Training them via reinforcement learning (RL) requires diverse and verifiable environments, but these environments are still mostly designed by human researchers, so their supply grows only as fast as resear...
Calibrated typed-decision ("System One") models return a label and a probability in a single forward pass at a small fraction of the cost of large language models (LLMs), yet their evaluation has been almost entirely English. We report a pre-registered evaluation of the commercial Jev model and the open Laya-multilingu...
Evaluating recommender systems before deployment requires simulators that remain realistic over long, closed-loop interaction cycles. Current LLM-based agents generally function as surface imitators that generate realistic short-term responses but fail to capture the underlying user dynamics such as fatigue, affect, an...
Chong Zhang, Qi-Jie Shen, Hai-Chao Zhang et al.· 0 citations
Candidate sourcing for recruiters is best viewed as a two-stage retrieval and reranking pipeline with recall as the primary objective under a limited review budget. An upstream production retriever first returns a candidate shortlist for each job description (JD), and our goal is to rerank that shortlist so that qualif...
Zhaohua Liang, Zhilin Wang, Renjie Cao et al.· 0 citations
Agentic reinforcement learning (RL) enables large language models (LLMs) to learn from multi-turn interactions with verifiable outcomes. Textual skills can improve exploration by distilling prior interactions into reusable guidance. However, existing skill-based RL approaches often either assume skill injection is bene...
Wenlin Zhong, Hao Wang, Kun Yuan et al.· 0 citations
Natural Language Autoencoders (NLAs) are proposed as oversight tools for language models: an Activation Verbaliser (AV) writes an English explanation of an activation vector, and an Activation Reconstructor (AR) maps the explanation back to a vector. Their value for oversight depends on a human monitor being able to te...
Language model systems repeatedly make test-time decisions by comparing similarity: they retrieve exemplars, rank candidates, and revise responses. Yet similarity is not unique: lexical, semantic, structural, and stylistic resemblance can point to different candidates, and the task-aligned notion can change across inst...
Chemical language models (CLMs) are pretrained on large corpora of molecules with the aim of learning representations that transfer to diverse downstream tasks. Here, we systematically study the effects of pretraining using a series of such CLMs across 64 molecular property prediction datasets. We find that the downstr...
External tools can extend the capabilities of small language models (SLMs), enabling their deployment in resource constrained environments. However, their limited capabilities make it difficult for SLMs to discover effective tool use behaviors through reinforcement learning alone, while direct teacher supervision suffe...
Hao-Xuan Gao, Qin-Wen Luo, Xiang Chen et al.· 0 citations
Diffusion language models reconstruct masked tokens in parallel, offering an alternative to autoregressive generation. Yet their Transformer backbones typically carry visible evidence and evolving masked predictions through a single residual stream. We equip masked diffusion models with multiple residual streams that p...
Ekaterina Alimaskina, S. Kazarian, G. Molodtsov et al.· 0 citations
Flint-interactive gives AI agents a language for creating interactive visualizations. Click a chart, filter data, highlight related content, and explore beyond the view the author originally chose. The post Flint-interactive: A language for creating interactive data visualizations appeared first on Microsoft Research.
A new computational approach reveals how cells communicate to assemble into tissues. This could accelerate stem cell engineering, improve disease models, and inform therapies.
Microsoft Research Blog· microsoft.comOct 15, 2026
Zero-knowledge proofs can verify computing results without rerunning workloads or exposing sensitive data. Magnetar helps bring them into the mainstream with support for standard programming languages, major speed gains, and quantum-resistant security. The post Proof-based general-purpose computing with Magnetar appeared first on Microsoft Research.
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