Microsoft Research
Articles about Microsoft Research
Simulating student learning for better AI tutoring
StudentSim is a research system for evaluating and improving AI tutoring tools before they are tested with learners. It models how individuals may engage with tutors, giving feedback to improve tutor performance across subjects like chess, writing, and mathematics:
Agent Lightning: Lightweight RL agent-training framework
Training AI agents with reinforcement learning can be challenging because their tools, context, and decision-making are managed by complex frameworks. Agent Lightning connects existing agents to RL training, making it easier to improve them without rebuilding them:
What AI gets wrong and what failure teaches us
Jennifer Neville did not want to go into computer science—but that’s exactly where she landed. Neville discusses the starts and stops that led to her professional sweet spot and her work identifying “surprising failures” making it hard for AI to handle complexity.
Forecasting space weather risks on power grids
Extreme space-weather events can damage power systems on Earth and degrade GPS accuracy and satellite operations. A new machine learning system can predict where damage is likely to occur 30-60 minutes before a storm arrives:
Introducing Quine: An AI research system designed for the complexity of biology
Biology doesn't operate in silos, and neither should the AI representation of it. Quine is an early-stage research effort to create a multimodal world model of biology. By connecting insights across biological scales and modalities, Quine helps scientists computationally search a space far larger than intuition allows and prioritize hypotheses before they reach the lab. Experimental results provide important feedback, helping researchers sharpen future research directions.
Singapore lab builds connections, drives frontier research in year one
Since launching a year ago, the Microsoft Research Asia — Singapore lab has established a strong foundation, deepened collaboration across government, academia, and industry, and explored how frontier AI research can create real-world value:
What if robots didn’t need all their AI onboard?
Robots are getting smarter, but how can their hardware match that growth? New Microsoft Research findings show that moving AI inference beyond the robot can improve task success, boost efficiency, and support more advanced physical AI workloads.
Improving synthesis prediction of small molecules at scale with RetroChimera
Custom-made molecules are advancing medicine, materials, and agriculture, but producing them is slow and expensive. A new Nature paper highlights RetroChimera, a predictive model that helps accelerate chemical synthesis, helping researchers explore a wide range of molecules.: