Highlights from Machine Translation and Multilinguality in November 2024

Mitigating Metric Bias in Minimum Bayes Risk Decoding Minimum Bayes Risk Decoding tries to get the most typical output from a language or machine translation model rather than the most probable one. The main idea is that the probability scores do not consider how semantically similar sentences are. Therefore, the most probable sequence might not be the most typical from a meaning perspective. The weak point is that we have to decide what metric to use to estimate the similarity, […]

December 4, 2024 Python

Expression vs Statement in Python: What’s the Difference?

After working with Python for a while, you’ll eventually come across two seemingly similar terms: expression and statement. When you browse the official documentation or dig through a Python-related thread on an online forum, you may get the impression that people use these terms interchangeably. That’s often true, but confusingly enough, there are cases when the expression vs statement distinction becomes important. So, what’s the difference between expressions and statements in Python? Take the Quiz: Test your knowledge with our […]

December 4, 2024 Artificial intelligence Leave a comment

Research Focus: Week of December 2, 2024

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. NEW RESEARCH Adaptive Security, Erasures, and Network Assumptions in Communication-Local MPC n-party Multi-Party Computation (MPC) is a cryptographic protocol technique that allows separate parties to securely compute a function on their joint data while keeping their inputs private. To build such a protocol,

December 4, 2024 Artificial intelligence Leave a comment

MarS: A unified financial market simulation engine in the era of generative foundation models

Introduction Generative foundation models have transformed various domains, creating new paradigms for content generation. Integrating these models with domain-specific data enables industry-specific applications. Microsoft Research has used this approach to develop the large market model (LMM) and the Financial Market Simulation Engine (MarS) for the financial domain. These innovations have the potential to empower financial researchers to customize generative models for diverse scenarios, establishing a new paradigm for applying generative models to downstream tasks in financial markets. This integration may […]

December 3, 2024 Python

Handling or Preventing Errors in Python: LBYL vs EAFP

Dealing with errors and exceptional situations is a common requirement in programming. You can either prevent errors before they happen or handle errors after they’ve happened. In general, you’ll have two coding styles matching these strategies: look before you leap (LBYL), and easier to ask forgiveness than permission (EAFP), respectively. In this video course, you’ll dive into the questions and considerations surrounding LBYL vs EAFP in Python. By learning about Python’s LBYL and EAFP coding styles, you’ll be able to […]

December 2, 2024 Python

Basic Input and Output in Python

Watch Now This tutorial has a related video course created by the Real Python team. Watch it together with the written tutorial to deepen your understanding: Reading Input and Writing Output in Python For a program to be useful, it often needs to communicate with the outside world. In Python, the input() function allows you to capture user input from the keyboard, while you can use the print() function to display output to the console. These built-in functions allow for […]

November 27, 2024 Python

Continuous Integration and Deployment for Python With GitHub Actions

Creating software is an achievement worth celebrating. But software is never static. Bugs need to be fixed, features need to be added, and security demands regular updates. In today’s landscape, with agile methodologies dominating, robust DevOps systems are crucial for managing an evolving codebase. That’s where GitHub Actions shine, empowering Python developers to automate workflows and ensure their projects adapt seamlessly to change. GitHub Actions for Python empowers developers to automate workflows efficiently. This enables teams to maintain software quality […]

November 27, 2024 Artificial intelligence Leave a comment

Advances in run-time strategies for next-generation foundation models

Groundbreaking advancements in frontier language models are progressing rapidly, paving the way for boosts in accuracy and reliability of generalist models, making them highly effective in specialized domains. As

November 26, 2024 Python

Managing Dependencies With Python Poetry

When your Python project relies on external packages, you need to make sure you’re using the right version of each package. After an update, a package might not work as it did before. A dependency manager like Python Poetry helps you specify, install, and resolve external packages in your projects. This way, you can be sure that you always work with the correct dependency version on every machine. In this video course, you’ll learn how to: Create a new project […]

November 25, 2024 Artificial intelligence Leave a comment

Accelerating drug discovery with TamGen: A generative AI approach to target-aware molecule generation

The Global Health Drug Discovery Institute (opens in new tab) (GHDDI) and Microsoft Research have reached a milestone in tuberculosis (TB) drug research with TamGen (opens in new tab), an open-source (opens in new tab), transformer-based chemical language model for developing target-specific drug compounds. Working in collaboration, the joint team successfully identified several promising inhibitors for a TB protease, with the most

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