Sahil Bhatnagar

Junxuan Li, Ryan Wickman, Sahil Bhatnagar et al. · microsoft-research

Operations research (OR) uses mathematical models to enhance decision-making, but developing these models requires expert knowledge and can be time-consuming. Automated mathematical programming (AMP) has emerged to simplify this process, but existing systems have limitations. This paper introduces a novel methodology that uses recent advances in Large Language Model (LLM) to create and edit OR solutions from non-expert user queries expressed using Natural Language. This reduces the need for domain expertise and the time to formulate a problem. The paper presents an end-to-end pipeline, named NL2OR, that generates solutions to OR problems from natural language input, and shares experimental results on several important OR problems.

Susheel Suresh, Hazel Mak, Shangpo Chou et al.

We present AgenticRAG, a practical agentic harness for retrieval and analysis over enterprise knowledge bases. Standard RAG pipelines place significant burden of grounding on the search stack, constraining the language model to a fixed candidate set chosen deep in the retrieval process. Our approach reduces this overdependence by layering a lightweight harness on top of existing enterprise search infrastructure, equipping a reasoning LLM with search, find, open, and summarize tools enabling the model to iteratively retrieve information, navigate within documents, and analyze evidence autonomously. On three open benchmarks we observe substantial gains: $49.6\%$ recall@1 on BRIGHT (+21.8 pp over the best embedding baseline), 0.96 factuality on WixQA ($+13\%$ relative improvement), and $92\%$ answer correctness on FinanceBench--within 2 pp of oracle access to true evidence. Ablation studies show that the most significant factor is the shift from single-shot retrieval to agentic tool use ($5.9\times$ improvement), while multi-query search and in-document navigation contribute to both quality and efficiency. We present various design choices in our agentic harness that were informed by pre-production deployments. Our results demonstrate its suitability for real-world enterprise production environments.

Pin-Jung Chen, Sahil Bhatnagar, Sagar Goyal et al.

Tasks critical to enterprise profitability, such as customer churn prediction, fraudulent account detection or customer lifetime value estimation, are often tackled by models trained on features engineered from customer data in tabular format. Application-specific feature engineering adds development, operationalization and maintenance costs over time. Recent advances in representation learning present an opportunity to simplify and generalize feature engineering across applications. When applying these advancements to tabular data researchers deal with data heterogeneity, variations in customer engagement history or the sheer volume of enterprise datasets. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to encode tabular data containing customer transactions, purchase history and other interactions into a generic representation of a customer's association with the business. We then evaluate these embeddings as features to train multiple models spanning a variety of applications. CASPR, Customer Activity Sequence-based Prediction and Representation, applies Transformer architecture to encode activity sequences to improve model performance and avoid bespoke feature engineering across applications. Our experiments at scale validate CASPR for both small and large enterprise applications.