Adrián Bazaga's Homepage

Welcome to my website!

Background:
I’m a Research Scientist at Microsoft, pioneering the development of cutting-edge foundational Small Language Models (SLMs) that power intelligent, agentic AI experiences directly on user devices for millions of users worldwide. My work focuses on advancing the frontier of on-device intelligence, bringing fast and capable AI to life at global scale.

I’m a core contributor to Mu, Microsoft’s blazing-fast on-device SLM, where I played a central role developing the pretraining, mid-training, and post-training pipelines. I also co-led the development of the Windows Settings AI agent, already live on Windows Copilot+ devices. These efforts are part of my broader vision to enable seamless, deeply integrated AI experiences for everyone.

I hold a Ph.D. in Machine Learning from the University of Cambridge, where I conducted research under the supervision of Prof. Pietro Liò and Prof. Gos Micklem. My work has been published in leading Machine Learning conferences such as ICLR, ICML, ACL and EMNLP, as well as in Nature journals. Previously, I gained research experience through internships at Microsoft Research and Amazon AGI, where I explored novel training schemes to enhance few-step generation in diffusion models, and test-time scaling for temporal reasoning with Large Language Models (LLMs). Prior to that, I spent ~5 years in various startups, working at the intersection of AI and biology.

Research Interests:
My research focuses on advancing the capabilities of AI in the areas of foundational LLMs, reasoning and multimodality. I’m particularly interested in developing architectures that enhance the applicability of generative models and integrate diverse data modalities to tackle both core challenges and real-world problems 🧪. My current focus is on building small-scale foundational language models with agentic capabilities, expanding their multimodal capabilities, refining new training methodologies, improving inference efficiency, and ensuring robustness and alignment. I’m passionate about impactful, global-scale AI and open to collaborations that push its boundaries 👐.

Beyond Research:
In addition to my core research, I’m interested in how advancements in generative models can revolutionize education and governance. I’m deeply committed to conducting research with a significant impact and am eager to engage in discussions and collaborations that align with these goals.