Microsoft Research Blog

Agent Lightning: Adding reinforcement learning to AI agents without code rewrites 

December 11, 2025
By decoupling how agents work from how they’re trained, Agent Lightning turns each step an agent takes into data for reinforcement learning. This makes it easy for developers to improve agent performance with almost zero code changes.

Recent Posts

  1. Research Focus: May 07, 2025

    Research Focus: Week of May 7, 2025 

    May 7, 2025

    In this issue: New research on compound AI systems and causal verification of the Confidential Consortium Framework; release of Phi-4-reasoning; enriching tabular data with semantic structure, and more.

  2. Research Focus -- Week of March 24

    Research Focus: Week of March 24, 2025 

    March 26, 2025

    In this issue, we examine a new conversation segmentation method that delivers more coherent and personalized agent conversation, and we review efforts to improve MLLMs’ understanding of geologic maps. Check out the latest research and other updates.

  3. graphical user interface, application, icon

    Advances to low-bit quantization enable LLMs on edge devices 

    February 5, 2025 | Shijie Cao, Lingxiao Ma, and Ting Cao

    Advances in low-bit quantization techniques enable efficient operation of LLMs on resource-constrained edge devices. Discover how innovations like T-MAC, Ladder, and LUT Tensor Core improve computational efficiency and enhance hardware compatibility.

  4. Research Focus: Week of January 31, 2025

    Research Focus: Week of January 27, 2025 

    January 31, 2025

    In this issue: A new approach to multimodal pretraining for remote sensing; Managed-retention memory for the AI era; Improving detection of macular telangiectasia type 2; Generalizing symbolic automata.

  5. Research Focus: Week of December 2, 2024

    Research Focus: Week of December 2, 2024 

    December 4, 2024

    Can a new SOS-RMT protocol enable more efficient CL-MPC?; A fair-by-design, cloud-based algorithmic trading platform; LLM2CLIP unlocks richer visual representation; New technique enhances Low-Rank Adaptation’s expressiveness, generalization capabilities.

  6. Research Focus: Week of November 11, 2024

    Research Focus: Week of November 11, 2024 

    November 13, 2024

    Holistic motion-capture calibration technique without calibration, manual intervention or custom hardware; Research on AI agents for autonomous clouds; Automating proof-oriented program construction; One-to-many testing for natural language code generation.

  7. SOSP 2024 on a blue and green gradient background

    Microsoft at SOSP 2024: Innovations in systems research 

    November 4, 2024

    Building resilient systems, scaling deep learning computation, and reproducing failures in production are just some of the ways Microsoft researchers are advancing the state of the art in computer systems research at SOSP 2024.

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    Research Focus: Week of October 28, 2024 

    November 1, 2024

    New Research | FLASH: Workflow automation agent for diagnosing recurring incidents; METAREFLECTION: Learning instructions for language agents using past reflections; Boosting LLM training efficiency through faster communication between GPUs; and more.

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