Portrait of Jianfeng Gao

Jianfeng Gao

Technical Fellow & Corporate Vice President

News & features

Flint blog | three white line icons on an abstract green background; bar chart icon, connected nodes icon, flowchart icon
Microsoft Research Blog

| Chenglong Wang, Alper Sarikaya, Scott Tsukamaki, Michel Galley, and Jianfeng Gao

Short chart specifications are easy to write, but often produce uninspiring results. Flint is an open-source visualization language that offers a middle path, letting AI agents create expressive charts from compact, human-editable specifications.

Understanding the brain | four white line icons on an abstract purple background: brain icon, chat bubble icon, circle with a checkmark icon, search icon
Microsoft Research Blog

| Chandan Singh and Jianfeng Gao

Researchers introduce generative causal testing, which translates black box models into clear hypotheses and verifies them in the scanner, revealing what specific brain regions respond to in language.

Three minimalist white line icons on a textured blue‑green gradient background: a rising bar chart on the left, a central hub‑and‑spoke network diagram in the middle, and a checkmark inside a circle on the right.
Microsoft Research Blog

| Chenglong Wang, Scott Tsukamaki, Michel Galley, and Jianfeng Gao

Data Formulator introduces AI-powered analytics for enterprise data workflows. Data teams can easily bring enterprise data into an AI-ready workspace where users can explore, analyze, and visualize data with AI agents to turn raw data into actionable insights.

AsgardBench | three whit icons on a blue to purple gradient background | first icon shows a laptop screen with a eye in the upper right corner, second icon shows relational nodes | third icon is a security shield with a checkmark
Microsoft Research Blog

| Andrea Tupini, Lars Liden, Reuben Tan, Yu Wang, and Jianfeng Gao

Imagine a robot tasked with cleaning a kitchen. It needs to observe its environment, decide what to do, and adjust when things don't go as expected, for example, when the mug it was tasked to wash is already clean, or…

V2GP framework | Three white line icons, showing a target within a rounded square, a checklist, and a robotic arm, on a blue‑to‑green gradient background.
Microsoft Research Blog

| Sehun Jung, HyunJee Song, Dong-Hee Kim, Reuben Tan, Jianfeng Gao, Yong Jae Lee, and Donghyun Kim

Vision-language models (VLMs) use images and text to plan robot actions, but they still struggle to decide what actions to take and where to take them. Most systems split these decisions into two steps: a VLM generates a plan in…

blue and purple gradient background with decorative white icons
Microsoft Research Blog

| Ke Yang, Michel Galley, Chenglong Wang, Jianfeng Gao, Jiawei Han, and ChengXiang Zhai

It seems counterintuitive: giving AI agents more memory can make them less effective. As interaction logs accumulate, they grow large, fill with irrelevant content, and become increasingly difficult to use. More memory means that agents must search through larger volumes of…

Diagram showing visual, audio, and document icons feeding into a central network icon of connected people, which then leads to a checkmark symbol, all on a blue‑to‑purple gradient background.
Microsoft Research Blog

| Reuben Tan, Baolin Peng, Zhengyuan Yang, Oier Mees, and Jianfeng Gao

Argos improves multimodal RL by evaluating whether an agent’s reasoning aligns with what it observes over time. The approach reduces visual hallucinations and produces more reliable, data-efficient agents for real-world applications.

Three white line icons on a gradient background transitioning from blue to pink. From left to right: a network or molecule structure with a central circle and six surrounding nodes, a 3D cube, and an open laptop with an eye symbol above it.
Microsoft Research Blog

| Yuncong Yang, Reuben Tan, Swadheen Shukla, and Jianfeng Gao

MindJourney can enable AI to navigate and interpret 3D environments from limited visual input, potentially improving performance in navigation, planning, and safety-critical tasks.

CollabLLM blog hero | flowchart diagram starting in the upper left corner with an icon of two overlapping chat bubbles; arrow pointing right to an LLM network node icon; branching down to show three simulated users; right arrow to a "Reward" box
Microsoft Research Blog

| Shirley Wu, Michel Galley, Baolin Peng, Swadheen Shukla, and Jianfeng Gao

Recipient of an ICML 2025 Outstanding Paper Award, CollabLLM improves how LLMs collaborate with users, including knowing when to ask questions and how to adapt tone and communication style to different situations. This approach helps move AI toward more user-centric…