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A quick guide to Amazon’s 50-plus papers at EMNLP 2024

Large language models predominate, both as a research subject themselves and as tools for researching topics of particular interest to Amazon, such as speech, recommendations, and information retrieval.

By Staff writer
November 14, 2024
7 min read
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Large language models (LLMs) have come to dominate the field of natural-language processing, so it’s no surprise that they also dominate the research that Amazon scientists are presenting at this year’s Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural-Language Processing (EMNLP). LLM training is the topic with the greatest number of Amazon papers, followed closely by strategies for mitigating misinformation in LLMs’ outputs — including but not limited to hallucinations. At the same time, a number of papers apply LLMs to topics of traditional interest at Amazon, such as speech, recommender systems, and information retrieval. (Papers marked with asterisks were accepted to Findings of EMNLP.)

AI agents

MARCO: Multi-agent real-time chat orchestration
Anubhav Shrimal, Shervin Malmasi, Kriti Biswas, Swarnalatha Raghuraman, Anish Nediyanchath, Yi Zhang, Promod Yenigalla

Code generation

CodeFort: Robust training for code generation models
Yuhao Zhang, Shiqi Wang, Haifeng Qian, Zijian Wang, Mingyue Shang, Linbo Liu, Sanjay Krishna Gouda, Baishakhi Ray, Murali Krishna Ramanathan, Xiaofei Ma, Anoop Deoras

Socratic human feedback (SoHF): Expert steering strategies for LLM code generation
Subramanian Chidambaram, Erran Li, Min Bai, Xiaopeng LI, Kaixiang Lin, Xiong Zhou, Alex C. Williams

Structured object language modeling (SoLM): Native structured objects generation conforming to complex schemas with self-supervised denoising
Amir Tavanaei, Kee Kiat Koo, Hayreddin Ceker, Shaobai Jiang, Qi Li, Julien Han, Karim Bouyarmane

Contrastive decoding

Explaining and improving contrastive decoding by extrapolating the probabilities of a huge and hypothetical LM
Haw-Shiuan Chang, Nanyun Peng, Mohit Bansal, Anil Ramakrishna, Tagyoung Chung

Explaining and improving contrastive decoding by extrapolating the probabilities of a huge and hypothetical LM.png
Given a simple question with clues, contrastive decoding could have an “obvious blindness” (e.g., assigning higher probability to an uncommon answer, such as "invertebrate", than to the most obvious answer, "bees"). In contrast, the asymptotic probability decoding proposed in "Explaining and improving contrastive decoding by extrapolating the probabilities of a huge and hypothetical LM" correctly assigns the highest probability to "bees" by leveraging the probabilities from multiple LMs of different sizes.

Data integration

ASTRA: Automatic schema matching using machine translation
Tarang Chugh, Deepak Zambre

Learning from natural language explanations for generalizable entity matching
Somin Wadhwa, Adit Krishnan, Runhui Wang, Byron C. Wallace, Chris (Luyang) Kong

Pretraining and finetuning language models on geospatial networks for accurate address matching
Saket Maheshwary, Arpan Paul, Saurabh Sohoney

Retrieval augmented spelling correction for e-commerce applications
Xuan Guo, Rohit Patki, Dante Everaert, Christopher Potts

Dataset distillation

Textual dataset distillation via language model embedding
Yefan Tao, Chris (Luyang) Kong, Andrey Kan, Laurent Callot

Textual dataset distillation via language model embedding: DaLLME.png
The DaLLME framework proposed in "Textual dataset distillation via language model embedding" begins by using a language model to transform raw textual data into embedding vectors. A set of distilled vectors is then derived in the embedding space, through a process designed to encapsulate maximum informational content. Finally, the vec2text model translates these distilled vectors back into textual form.

Document understanding

DocKD: Knowledge distillation from LLMs for open-world document understanding models
Sungnyun Kim, Haofu Liao, Srikar Appalaraju, Peng Tang, Zhuowen Tu, Ravi Kumar Satzoda, R. Manmatha, Vijay Mahadevan, Stefano Soatto

Information retrieval

Evaluating D-MERIT of partial-annotation on information retrieval
Royi Rassin, Yaron Fairstein, Oren Kalinsky, Guy Kushilevitz, Nachshon Cohen, Alexander Libov, Yoav Goldberg

Identifying high consideration e-commerce search queries
Zhiyu Chen, Jason Choi, Besnik Fetahu, Shervin Malmasi

Learning when to retrieve, what to rewrite, and how to respond in conversational QA*
Nirmal Roy, Leonardo Ribeiro, Rexhina Blloshmi, Kevin Small

Natural-language understanding

Intent detection in the age of LLMs
Gaurav Arora, Shreya Jain, Srujana Merugu

Intent detection in the age of LLMs.png
"Intent detection in the age of LLMs" proposes a methodology for adaptive in-context learning and chain-of-thought-based intent detection using LLMs.

Predicting entity salience in extremely short documents
Ben Bullough, Harrison Lundberg, Chen Hu, Weihang Xiao

LLM evaluation

AXCEL: Automated eXplainable consistency evaluation using LLMs*
P Aditya Sreekar, Sahil Verma, Suransh Chopra, Sarik Ghazarian, Abhishek Persad, Narayanan Sadagopan

Precise model benchmarking with only a few observations
Riccardo Fogliato, Pratik Patil, Nil-Jana Akpinar, Mathew Monfort

LLM fine tuning

AdaZeta: Adaptive zeroth-order tensor-train adaption for memory-efficient large language models fine-tuning
Yifan Yang, Kai Zhen, Ershad Banijamali, Thanasis Mouchtaris, Zheng Zhang

RoseLoRA: Row and column-wise sparse low-rank adaptation of pre-trained language model for knowledge editing and fine-tuning
Haoyu Wang, Tianci Liu, Ruirui Li, Monica Cheng, Tuo Zhao, Jing Gao

RoseLoRA.png
The row- and column-wise sparse low-rank adaptation (RoseLoRA) framework proposed in "RoseLoRA: Row and column-wise sparse low-rank adaptation of pre-trained language model for knowledge editing and fine-tuning".

LLMs for speech

Speechworthy instruction-tuned language models
Hyundong Cho, Nicolaas Jedema, Leonardo Ribeiro, Karishma Sharma, Pedro Szekely, Alessandro Moschitti, Ruben Janssen, Jonathan May

LLM misinformation mitigation

ECON: On the detection and resolution of evidence conflicts
Cheng Jiayang, Chunkit Chan, Qianqian Zhuang, Lin Qiu, Tianhang Zhang, Tengxiao Liu, Yangqiu Song, Yue Zhang, Pengfei Liu, Zheng Zhang

Generative subgraph retrieval for knowledge graph–grounded dialog generation
Jinyoung Park, Minseok Joo, Joo-Kyung Kim, Hyunwoo J. Kim

HalluMeasure: Fine-grained hallucination measurement using chain-of-thought reasoning
Shayan Ali Akbar, Md Mosharaf Hossain, Tess Wood, Si-Chi Chin, Erica Salinas, Victor Alvarez, Erwin Cornejo

Knowledge-centric hallucination detection
Xiangkun Hu, Dongyu Ru, Lin Qiu, Qipeng Guo, Tianhang Zhang, Yang Xu, Yun Luo, Pengfei Liu, Zheng Zhang, Yue Zhang

LLM reasoning

Auto-evolve: Enhancing large language model’s performance via self-reasoning framework*
Krishna Aswani, Alex Lu, Pranav Patankar, Priya Dhalwani, Iris Tan, Jayant Ganeshmohan, Simon Lacasse

LLM self-correction

LLM self-correction with DeCRIM: Decompose, critique, and refine for enhanced following of instructions with multiple constraints
Thomas Palmeira Ferraz, Kartik Mehta, Yu-Hsiang Lin, Haw-Shiuan Chang, Shereen Oraby, Sijia Liu, Vivek Subramanian, Tagyoung Chung, Mohit Bansal, Nanyun Peng

DeCRIM.png
In the DeCRIM pipeline proposed in "LLM self-correction with DeCRIM: Decompose, critique, and refine for enhanced following of instructions with multiple constraints", an LLM first generates a response to a user request. The Decomposer then breaks down the request into granular constraints, and the Critic model gives feedback on whether the response meets those constraints. If it does, the response is output; if not, the LLM uses the feedback to refine the response.

LLM training

Dancing in chains: Reconciling instruction following and faithfulness in language models
Zhengxuan Wu, Yuhao Zhang, Peng Qi, Yumo Xu, Rujun Han, Yian Zhang, Jifan Chen, Bonan Min, Zhiheng Huang

DEM: Distribution edited model for training with mixed data distributions
Dhananjay Ram, Aditya Rawal, Momchil Hardalov, Nikolaos Pappas, Sheng Zha

DEM: Distribution Edited Model for Training with Mixed Data Distributions
The distribution-edited model (ΘD) described in "DEM: Distribution edited model for training with mixed data distributions" results from fine-tuning a pretrained model (Θ) on n individual data distributions (Di) and combining the resulting models with basic element-wise vector operations. Here, the extracted distribution vectors (∆ΘDi ) are multiplied by weight coefficients, and the weighted sum is added to the base model.

Evolutionary contrastive distillation for language model alignment
Julian Katz-Samuels, Zheng Li, Hyokun Yun, Priyanka Nigam, Yi Xu, Vaclav Petricek, Bing Yin, Trishul Chilimbi

Hop, skip, jump to convergence: Dynamics of learning rate transitions for improved training of large language models
Shreyas Subramanian, Vignesh Ganapathiraman, Corey Barrett

Learning from relevant subgoals in successful dialogs using iterative training for task-oriented dialog systems
Magdalena Kaiser, Patrick Ernst, Gyuri Szarvas

Quality matters: Evaluating synthetic data for tool-using LLMs
Shadi Iskander, Nachshon Cohen, Zohar Karnin, Ori Shapira, Sofia Tolmach

Query autocompletion

AmazonQAC: A large-scale, naturalistic query autocomplete dataset
Dante Everaert, Rohit Patki, Tianqi Zheng, Christopher Potts

DiAL: Diversity aware listwise ranking for query auto-complete
Sonali Singh, Sachin Farfade, Prakash Mandayam Comar

Question answering

RAG-QA arena: Evaluating domain robustness for long-form retrieval-augmented question answering
Rujun Han, Yuhao Zhang, Peng Qi, Yumo Xu, Jenyuan Wang, Lan Liu, William Yang Wang, Bonan Min, Vittorio Castelli

Retrieving contextual information for long-form question answering using weak supervision
Philipp Christmann, Svitlana Vakulenko, Ionut Teodor Sorodoc, Bill Byrne, Adrià de Gispert

Recommender systems

Efficient pointwise-pairwise learning-to-rank for news recommendation
Nithish Kannen Senthilkumar, Yao Ma, Gerrit van den Burg, Jean Baptiste Faddoul

Efficient pointwise-pairwise learning-to-rank for news recommendation.png
An illustration of the GLIMPSE framework proposed in "Efficient pointwise-pairwise learning-to-rank for news recommendation". GLIMPSE adopts a multitask approach in which a pretrained language model is fine-tuned on both the relevance prediction task and the pairwise-preference task. During inference, the relevance predictions are used to produce an initial pointwise ranking, which is subsequently improved by one or more right-to-left (RTL) passes using pairwise comparisons.

PEARL: Preference extraction with exemplar augmentation and retrieval with LLM agents
Vijit Malik, Akshay Jagatap, Vinayak Puranik, Anirban Majumder

Sequential LLM framework for fashion recommendation
Han Liu, Xianfeng Tang, Tianlang Chen, Jiapeng Liu, Indu Indu, Henry Peng Zou, Peng Dai, Roberto Fernandez Galan, Mike Porter, Dongmei Jia, Ning Zhang, Lian Xiong

Responsible AI

Attribute controlled fine-tuning for large language models: A case study on detoxification
Tao Meng, Ninareh Mehrabi, Palash Goyal, Anil Ramakrishna, Aram Galstyan, Richard Zemel, Kai-Wei Chang, Rahul Gupta, Charith Peris

FLIRT: Feedback loop in-context red teaming
Ninareh Mehrabi, Palash Goyal, Christophe Dupuy, Qian Hu, Shalini Ghosh, Richard Zemel, Kai-Wei Chang, Aram Galstyan, Rahul Gupta

Order of magnitude speedups for LLM membership inference
Rongting Zhang, Martin Bertran Lopez, Aaron Roth

Synthetic data generation

CorrSynth: A correlated sampling method for diverse dataset generation from LLMs
Suhas Kowshik, Abhishek Divekar, Vijit Malik

A Correlated Sampling Method for Diverse Dataset Generation from LLMs
"CorrSynth: A correlated sampling method for diverse dataset generation from LLMs" introduces a sampling method that uses anti-correlation between examples rather than few-shot generation.

DATA ADVISOR: Dynamic data curation for safety alignment of large language models
Fei Wang, Ninareh Mehrabi, Palash Goyal, Rahul Gupta, Kai-Wei Chang, Aram Galstyan

Evaluating differentially private synthetic data generation in high-stakes domains
Krithika Ramesh, Nupoor Gandhi, Pulkit Madaan, Lisa Bauer, Charith Peris, Anjalie Field

SYNTHESIZRR: Generating diverse datasets with retrieval augmentation
Abhishek Divekar, Greg Durrett

Abstract depiction of the SYNTHESIZRR procedure
Abstract depiction of the procedure proposed in "SYNTHESIZRR: Generating diverse datasets with retrieval augmentation". The content sourcing stage retrieves K unique documents {r1,...,rK} from a large corpus for each in-context covariate xICL. The task-inversion stage uses a parameterized context refinement prompt, Pτ, which takes parameters Rinv (inversion instruction), rk (a retrieved document), and V(yICL) (the verbalized target label). A generalist teacher LLM autoregressively generates a synthetic covariate. Each in-context example thus produces K unique synthetic examples {x̃1,..., x̃K}, which we include in the dataset with target yICL.

Text classification

Distance-aware calibration for pre-trained language models*
Alberto Gasparin, Gianluca Detommaso

Performance-guided LLM knowledge distillation for efficient text classification at scale

Flavio Di Palo, Prateek Singhi, Bilal Fadlallah

Prompt-tuned muti-task taxonomic transformer (PTMTTaxoFormer)
Rajashekar Vasantha, Nhan Nguyen, Yue Zhang

Text summarization

Salient information prompting to steer content in prompt-based abstractive summarization
Lei Xu, Asad Karim, Saket Dingliwal, Aparna Elangovan

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Applied Scientist II, Prime Video Personalization and Discovery Science, Prime Video - Personalization and Discovery Science
US, CA, Sunnyvale
Prime Video is a first-stop entertainment destination offering customers a vast collection of premium programming in one app available across thousands of devices. Prime members can customize their viewing experience and find their favorite movies, series, documentaries, and live sports – including Amazon MGM Studios-produced series and movies; licensed fan favorites; and programming from Prime Video add-on subscriptions such as Apple TV+, Max, Crunchyroll and MGM+. All customers, regardless of whether they have a Prime membership or not, can rent or buy titles via the Prime Video Store, and can enjoy even more content for free with ads. Are you interested in shaping the future of entertainment? Prime Video's technology teams are creating best-in-class digital video experience. As a Prime Video technologist, you’ll have end-to-end ownership of the product, user experience, design, and technology required to deliver state-of-the-art experiences for our customers. You’ll get to work on projects that are fast-paced, challenging, and varied. You’ll also be able to experiment with new possibilities, take risks, and collaborate with remarkable people. We’ll look for you to bring your diverse perspectives, ideas, and skill-sets to make Prime Video even better for our customers. With global opportunities for talented technologists, you can decide where a career Prime Video Tech takes you! Key job responsibilities Develop foundation models for content understanding using state-of-the-art deep learning and multimodal learning techniques to analyze video and text Build time sequence foundation models to understand and predict customer behavior patterns and viewing trajectories Work closely with engineers and product managers to design, implement and launch solutions end-to-end across various Prime Video experiences Design and conduct offline and online (A/B) experiments to evaluate proposed solutions based on in-depth data analyses Effectively communicate technical and non-technical ideas with teammates and stakeholders Stay up-to-date with advancements and the latest modeling techniques in foundation models, multimodal learning, and time series analysis Publish your research findings in top conferences and journals A day in the life We're using advanced approaches such as foundation models to connect information about our videos and customers from a variety of information sources, acquiring and processing data sets on a scale that only a few companies in the world can match. This will enable us to recommend titles effectively, even when we don't have a large behavioral signal (to tackle the cold-start title problem). It will also allow us to find our customer's niche interests, helping them discover groups of titles that they didn't even know existed. We are looking for creative & customer obsessed machine learning scientists who can apply the latest research, state of the art algorithms and ML to build highly scalable page personalization solutions. You'll be a research leader in the space and a hands-on ML practitioner, guiding and collaborating with talented teams of engineers and scientists and senior leaders in the Prime Video organization. You will also have the opportunity to publish your research at internal and external conferences. About the team Prime Video Recommendation Science team owns science solution to power recommendation and personalization experience on various Prime Video surfaces and devices. We work closely with the engineering teams to launch our solutions in production.
Research Scientist, Special Projects
US, WA, Seattle
Innovators wanted! Are you an entrepreneur? A builder? A dreamer? This role is part of an Amazon Special Projects team that takes the company’s Think Big leadership principle to the nextlevel. We focus on creating entirely new products and services with a goal of positively impacting the lives of our customers. No industries or subject areas are out of bounds. If you’re interested in innovating at scale to address big challenges in the world, this is the team for you. As a Research Scientist, you will work with a unique and gifted team developing exciting products for consumers and collaborate with cross-functional teams. Our team rewards intellectual curiosity while maintaining a laser-focus in bringing products to market. At the intersession of both academic and applied research in this product area, you have the opportunity to work together with some of the most talented scientists, engineers, and product managers. Here at Amazon, we embrace our differences. We are committed to furthering our culture of inclusion. We have thirteen employee-led affinity groups, reaching 40,000 employees in over 190 chapters globally. We are constantly learning through programs that are local, regional, and global. Amazon’s culture of inclusion is reinforced within our 16 Leadership Principles, which remind team members to seek diverse perspectives, learn and be curious, and earn trust. Our team highly values work-life balance, mentorship and career growth. We believe striking the right balance between your personal and professional life is critical to life-long happiness and fulfillment. We care about your career growth and strive to assign projects and offer training that will challenge you to become your best.
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