Microsoft Research Asia
News & features
| Heecheol Kim and Namiko Saito
As Microsoft Research Asia – Tokyo’s first research intern, Lilika Makabe brought her computer vision expertise into embodied AI and robotics, exploring new research questions through hands-on experimentation and interdisciplinary collaboration.
Agent Lightning v1.0: A 3,500-Line Lightweight Agentic RL Framework for Training Agents with Real Harnesses
| Zhiyuan He and Yuqing Yang
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.
One year in: How Microsoft Research Asia – Singapore is advancing research, partnership and talent for real-world impact
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.
Today, the chat window is still the main way people interact with large models and agents: users ask a question, the AI answers, and each follow-up extends the thread. This is simple and natural, but fundamentally linear. When a question…
SkillOpt: Agent skills as trainable parameters
| Yifan Yang, Xuemei Gao, Qi Dai, Bei Liu, Kai Qiu, Dongdong Chen, and Chong Luo
AI agents often fail because their instructions, or skills, are manually modified with no guarantee of improvement. Learn how SkillOpt turns skill editing into a training process, making agent behavior more reliable without changing model weights.
By Kinam Kim, Namiko Saito, Heecheol Kim, Katsushi Ikeuchi, Jaegul Choo and Yasuyuki Matsushita Published in 2026 Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL) Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models enable broad manipulation capabilities by leveraging large-scale pretraining and robot demonstrations. However, imitation learning can cause…
When you see robots participating in running races or performing folk dances on stage, you might envision a future where a simple natural language command is all it takes for a robot to tidy up a desk, clean a room,…
Microsoft at NSDI 2026: Advances in large-scale networked systems
| Sujata Banerjee
Microsoft researchers share advances in building and operating large-scale distributed systems, spanning datacenters, networking, and the growing intersection with AI during NSDI ’26.
Imagine an AI assistant that can navigate a computer the same way humans do—clicking buttons, filling out forms, and moving between applications—all by simply interpreting what’s on the screen. This vision is becoming a reality through computer use agents—AI systems…