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I put Microsoft's new Copilot tools to work in Office. It performed like an eager intern

PCWorld

PCWorld reports Microsoft 365 Copilot has evolved from offering passive suggestions to actively making live changes in Excel, PowerPoint, and Word documents. The upgraded agentic capabilities allow Copilot to create presentations and documents from scratch, though with some limitations like missing graphics. These enhanced features are available across Microsoft 365 Copilot, Premium, Personal, and Family subscriptions, representing a significant productivity upgrade. Although Microsoft's Copilot reportedly remains far behind competing AI Large Language Models (LLMs) in terms of usage, the Copilot built into its Microsoft 365 applications remains a potent assistant.



Continuous Mean-Covariance Bandits

Neural Information Processing Systems

Existing risk-aware multi-armed bandit models typically focus on risk measures of individual options such as variance. As a result, they cannot be directly applied to important real-world online decision making problems with correlated options. In this paper, we propose a novel Continuous Mean-Covariance Bandit (CMCB) model to explicitly take into account option correlation. Specifically, in CMCB, there is a learner who sequentially chooses weight vectors on given options and observes random feedback according to the decisions. The agent's objective is to achieve the best trade-off between reward and risk, measured with option covariance.





Sageflow: Robust Federated Learning against Both Stragglers and Adversaries (Supplementary Material)

Neural Information Processing Systems

A.1 Scenario with only stragglers The hyperparameter settings for Sageflow are shown in Table 1. For the schemes ignore stragglers and wait for stragglers combined with FedAvg, we decayed the learning rate during training. For the FedAsync scheme of [7], we take a polynomial strategy with hyperparameters a= 0.5, α= 0.8, and decayed γ during training. A.2 Scenario with only adversaries Data poisoning and model poisoning attacks: Table 2 describes the hyperparameters for Sageflow with only adversaries, under data poisoning and model poisoning attacks. For RFA of [5], the maximum iteration is set to 10. In this setup, the learning rate is decayed for all three schemes (Sageflow, RFA, FedAvg).


Sageflow: Robust Federated Learning against Both Stragglers and Adversaries

Neural Information Processing Systems

While federated learning (FL) allows efficient model training with local data at edge devices, among major issues still to be resolved are: slow devices known as stragglers and malicious attacks launched by adversaries. While the presence of both of these issues raises serious concerns in practical FL systems, no known schemes or combinations of schemes effectively address them at the same time. We propose Sageflow, staleness-aware grouping with entropy-based filtering and loss-weighted averaging, to handle both stragglers and adversaries simultaneously. Model grouping and weighting according to staleness (arrival delay) provides robustness against stragglers, while entropy-based filtering and loss-weighted averaging, working in a highly complementary fashion at each grouping stage, counter a wide range of adversary attacks. A theoretical bound is established to provide key insights into the convergence behavior of Sageflow. Extensive experimental results show that Sageflow outperforms various existing methods aiming to handle stragglers/adversaries.