Maik Riechert

Gongbo Zhang, Yanting Li, Renqian Luo et al. · microsoft-research

Function in natural systems arises from one-dimensional sequences forming three-dimensional structures with specific properties. However, current generative models suffer from critical limitations: training objectives seldom target function directly, discrete sequences and continuous coordinates are optimized in isolation, and conformational ensembles are under-modeled. We present UniGenX, a unified generative foundation model that addresses these gaps by co-generating sequences and coordinates under direct functional and property objectives across proteins, molecules, and materials. UniGenX represents heterogeneous inputs as a mixed stream of symbolic and numeric tokens, where a decoder-only autoregressive transformer provides global context and a conditional diffusion head generates numeric fields steered by task-specific tokens. Besides the new high SOTAs on structure prediction tasks, the model demonstrates state-of-the-art or competitive performance for the function-aware generation across domains: in materials, it achieves "conflicted" multi-property conditional generation, yielding 436 crystal candidates meeting triple constraints, including 11 with novel compositions; in chemistry, it sets new benchmarks on five property targets and conformer ensemble generation on GEOM; and in biology, it improves success in modeling protein induced fit (RMSD < 2 Å) by over 23-fold and enhances EC-conditioned enzyme design. Ablation studies and cross-domain transfer substantiate the benefits of joint discrete-continuous training, establishing UniGenX as a significant advance from prediction to controllable, function-aware generation.

Cristian Bodnar, Wessel P. Bruinsma, Ana Lucic et al.

Reliable forecasts of the Earth system are crucial for human progress and safety from natural disasters. Artificial intelligence offers substantial potential to improve prediction accuracy and computational efficiency in this field, however this remains underexplored in many domains. Here we introduce Aurora, a large-scale foundation model for the Earth system trained on over a million hours of diverse data. Aurora outperforms operational forecasts for air quality, ocean waves, tropical cyclone tracks, and high-resolution weather forecasting at orders of magnitude smaller computational expense than dedicated existing systems. With the ability to fine-tune Aurora to diverse application domains at only modest computational cost, Aurora represents significant progress in making actionable Earth system predictions accessible to anyone.

Alexey Svyatkovskiy, Sebastian Lee, Anna Hadjitofi et al.

Code completion is one of the most widely used features of modern integrated development environments (IDEs). While deep learning has made significant progress in the statistical prediction of source code, state-of-the-art neural network models consume hundreds of megabytes of memory, bloating the development environment. We address this in two steps: first we present a modular neural framework for code completion. This allows us to explore the design space and evaluate different techniques. Second, within this framework we design a novel reranking neural completion model that combines static analysis with granular token encodings. The best neural reranking model consumes just 6 MB of RAM, - 19x less than previous models - computes a single completion in 8 ms, and achieves 90% accuracy in its top five suggestions.

Alexander L. Gaunt, Matthew A. Johnson, Maik Riechert et al.

New types of machine learning hardware in development and entering the market hold the promise of revolutionizing deep learning in a manner as profound as GPUs. However, existing software frameworks and training algorithms for deep learning have yet to evolve to fully leverage the capability of the new wave of silicon. We already see the limitations of existing algorithms for models that exploit structured input via complex and instance-dependent control flow, which prohibits minibatching. We present an asynchronous model-parallel (AMP) training algorithm that is specifically motivated by training on networks of interconnected devices. Through an implementation on multi-core CPUs, we show that AMP training converges to the same accuracy as conventional synchronous training algorithms in a similar number of epochs, but utilizes the available hardware more efficiently even for small minibatch sizes, resulting in significantly shorter overall training times. Our framework opens the door for scaling up a new class of deep learning models that cannot be efficiently trained today.