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A quick guide to Amazon's 65-plus papers at this year's ACL

Familiar topics such as question answering and natural-language understanding remain well represented, but a new concentration on language modeling and multimodal models reflect the spread of generative AI.

By Staff writer
July 10, 2023
10 min read
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Between the main conference and the recently inaugurated ACL Proceedings, Amazon researchers have more than 65 papers at this year's meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL).

Automatic speech recognition

Masked audio text encoders are effective multi-modal rescorers*
Jason Cai, Monica Sunkara, Xilai Li, Anshu Bhatia, Xiao Pan, Sravan Bodapati

Code generation

A static evaluation of code completion by large language models
Hantian Ding, Varun Kumar, Yuchen Tian, Zijian Wang, Rob Kwiatkowski, Xiaopeng LI, Murali Krishna Ramanathan, Baishakhi Ray, Parminder Bhatia, Sudipta Sengupta, Dan Roth, Bing Xiang

Multitask pretraining with structured knowledge for text-to-SQL generation
Robert Giaquinto, Dejiao Zhang, Benjamin Kleiner, Yang Li, Ming Tan, Parminder Bhatia, Ramesh Nallapati, Xiaofei Ma

Code switching

Code-switched text synthesis in unseen language pairs*
I-Hung Hsu, Avik Ray, Shubham Garg, Nanyun Peng, Jing Huang

Code-switched text synthesis.png
From "Code-switched text synthesis in unseen language pairs".

CoMix: Guide transformers to code-mix using POS structure and phonetics*
Gaurav Arora, Srujana Merugu, Vivek Sembium

Continual learning

Characterizing and measuring linguistic dataset drift
Tyler A. Chang, Kishaloy Halder, Neha Anna John, Yogarshi Vyas, Yassine Benajiba, Miguel Ballesteros, Dan Roth

Data-/table-to-text applications

An inner table retriever for robust table question answering
Weizhe Lin, Rexhina Blloshmi, Bill Byrne, Adrià de Gispert, Gonzalo Iglesias

Few-shot data-to-text generation via unified representation and multi-source learning
Alexander Hanbo Li, Mingyue Shang, Evangelia Spiliopoulou, JIE MA, Patrick Ng, Zhiguo Wang, Bonan Min, William Wang, Kathleen McKeown, Vittorio Castelli, Dan Roth, Bing Xiang

Improving cross-task generalization of unified table-to-text models with compositional task configurations*
Jifan Chen, Yuhao Zhang, Lan Liu, Rui Dong, Xinchi Chen, Patrick Ng, William Wang, Zhiheng Huang

LI-RAGE: Late interaction retrieval augmented generation with explicit signals for open-domain table question answering
Weizhe Lin, Rexhina Blloshmi, Bill Byrne, Adrià de Gispert, Gonzalo Iglesias

Dialogue

Diable: Efficient dialogue state tracking as operations on tables*
Pietro Lesci, Yoshinari Fujinuma, Momchil Hardalov, Chao Shang, Lluis Marquez

NatCS: Eliciting natural customer support dialogues
James Gung, Emily Moeng, Wesley Rose, Arshit Gupta, Yi Zhang, Saab Mansour

Schema-guided user satisfaction modeling for task-oriented dialogues
Yue Feng, Yunlong Jiao, Animesh Prasad, Nikolaos Aletras, Emine Yilmaz, Gabriella Kazai

Toward more accurate and generalizable evaluation metrics for task-oriented dialogs
Abi Komma, Nagesh Panyam, Timothy Leffel, Anuj Goyal, Angeliki Metallinou, Spyros Matsoukas, Aram Galstyan

Explainable AI

Efficient Shapley values estimation by amortization for text classification
Alan Yang, Fan Yin, He He, Kai-Wei Chang, Xiaofei Ma, Bing Xiang

Efficient Shapley values.png
From "Efficient Shapley values estimation by amortization for text classification".

Few shot rationale generation using self-training with dual teachers*
Aditya Srikanth Veerubhotla, Lahari Poddar, Jun Yin, Gyuri Szarvas, Sharanya Eswaran

Information extraction

An AMR-based link prediction approach for document-level event argument extraction
Yuqing Yang, Qipeng Guo, Xiangkun Hu, Yue Zhang, Qipeng Guo, Zheng Zhang

AVEN-GR: Attribute value extraction and normalization using product graphs
Donato Crisostomi, Thomas Ricatte

Large scale generative multimodal attribute extraction for e-commerce attributes
Anant Khandelwal, Happy Mittal, Shreyas Sunil Kulkarni, Deepak Gupta

ParaAMR: A large-scale syntactically diverse paraphrase dataset by AMR back-translation
Kuan-Hao Huang, Varun Iyer, I-Hung Hsu, Anoop Kumar, Kai-Wei Chang, Aram Galstyan

ParaAMR.png
From "ParaAMR: A large-scale syntactically diverse paraphrase dataset by AMR back-translation".

Weakly supervised hierarchical multi-task classification of customer questions
Jitenkumar Rana, Promod Yenigalla, Chetan Aggarwal, Sandeep Mukku, Manan Soni, Rashmi Patange

WebIE: Faithful and robust information extraction on the web
Chenxi Whitehouse, Clara Vania, Alham Fikri Aji, Christos Christodoulopoulos, Andrea Pierleoni

Information retrieval

CUPID: Curriculum learning based real-time prediction using distillation
Arindam Bhattacharya, Ankith M S, Ankit Gandhi, Vijay Huddar, Atul Saroop, Rahul Bhagat

Direct fact retrieval from knowledge graphs without entity linking
Jinheon Baek, Alham Fikri Aji, Jens Lehmann, Sung Ju Hwang

Language modeling

Adaptation approaches for nearest neighbor language models*
Rishabh Bhardwaj, George Polovets, Monica Sunkara

CONTRACLM: Contrastive learning for causal language model
Nihal Jain, Dejiao Zhang, Wasi Ahmad, Zijian Wang, Feng Nan, Xiaopeng LI, Ming Tan, Baishakhi Ray, Parminder Bhatia, Xiaofei Ma, Ramesh Nallapati, Bing Xiang

Controlled text generation with hidden representation transformations*
Vaibhav Kumar, Hana Koorehdavoudi, Masud Moshtaghi, Amita Misra, Ankit Chadha, Emilio Ferrara

KILM: Knowledge injection into encoder-decoder language models
Yan XU, Mahdi Namazifar, Devamanyu Hazarika, Aishwarya Padmakumar, Yang Liu, Dilek Hakkani-Tür

KILM.png
From "KILM: Knowledge injection into encoder-decoder language models".

ReAugKD: Retrieval-augmented knowledge distillation for pre-trained language models
Jianyi Zhang, Aashiq Muhamed, Aditya Anantharaman, Guoyin Wang, Changyou Chen, Kai Zhong, Qingjun Cui, Yi Xu, Belinda Zeng, Trishul Chilimbi, Yiran Chen

Recipes for sequential pre-training of multilingual encoder and seq2seq models*
Saleh Soltan, Andy Rosenbaum, Tobias Falke, Qin Lu, Anna Rumshisky, Wael Hamza

Rethinking the role of scale for in-context learning: An interpretability-based case study at 66 billion scale
Hritik Bansal, Karthik Gopalakrishnan, Saket Dingliwal, Sravan Bodapati, Katrin Kirchhoff, Dan Roth

Machine learning

Mitigating the burden of redundant datasets via batch-wise unique samples and frequency-aware losses
Donato Crisostomi, Andrea Caciolai, Alessandro Pedrani, Alessandro Manzotti, Enrico Palumbo, Kay Rottmann, Davide Bernardi

Machine translation

RAMP: Retrieval and attribute-marking enhanced prompting for attribute-controlled translation
Gabriele Sarti, Phu Mon Htut, Xing Niu, Benjamin Hsu, Anna Currey, Georgiana Dinu, Maria Nădejde

Multimodal models

Benchmarking diverse-modal entity linking with generative models*
Sijia Wang, Alexander Li, Henry Zhu, Sheng Zhang, Pramuditha Perera, Chung-Wei Hang, JIE MA, William Wang, Zhiguo Wang, Vittorio Castelli, Bing Xiang, Patrick Ng

Generate then select: Open-ended visual question answering guided by world knowledge*
Xingyu Fu, Sheng Zhang, Gukyeong Kwon, Pramuditha Perera, Henry Zhu, Yuhao Zhang, Alexander Hanbo Li, William Wang, Zhiguo Wang, Vittorio Castelli, Patrick Ng, Dan Roth, Bing Xiang

KG-FLIP: Knowledge-guided fashion-domain language-image pre-training for e-commerce
Qinjin Jia, Yang Liu, Shaoyuan Xu, Huidong Liu, Daoping Wu, Jinmiao Fu, Roland Vollgraf, Bryan Wang

Resolving ambiguities in text-to-image generative models
Ninareh Mehrabi, Palash Goyal, Apurv Verma, Jwala Dhamala, Varun Kumar, Qian Hu, Kai-Wei Chang, Richard Zemel, Aram Galstyan, Rahul Gupta

Translation-enhanced multilingual text-to-image generation
Yaoyiran Li, Ching-Yun (Frannie) Chang, Stephen Rawls, Ivan Vulić, Anna Korhonen

Unsupervised melody-to-lyric generation
Yufei Tian, Anjali Narayan-Chen, Shereen Oraby, Alessandra Cervone, Chenyang Tao, Gunnar Sigurdsson, Wenbo Zhao, Tagyoung Chung, Jing Huang, Violet Peng

Unsupervised melody-to-lyric.png
From "Unsupervised melody-to-lyric generation".

Natural-language processing

Multi-VALUE: A framework for cross-dialectal English NLP
Caleb Ziems, William Held, Jingfeng Yang, Jwala Dhamala, Rahul Gupta, Diyi Yang

vONTSS: vMF based semi-supervised neural topic modeling with optimal transport*
Weijie Xu, Xiaoyu Jiang, Srinivasan Sengamedu, "SHS", Francis Iannacci, Jinjin Zhao

Natural-language understanding

ECG-QALM: Entity-controlled synthetic text generation using contextual Q&A for NER*
Karan Aggarwal, Henry Jin, Aitzaz Ahmad

Entity contrastive learning in a large-scale virtual assistant system
Jonathan Rubin, Jason Crowley, George Leung, Morteza Ziyadi, Maria Minakova

EPIC: Multi-perspective annotation of a corpus of irony
Simona Frenda, Alessandro Pedrani, Valerio Basile, Soda Marem Lo, Alessandra Teresa Cignarella, Raffaella Panizzon, Cristina Marco, Bianca Scarlini, Viviana Patti, Cristina Bosco, Davide Bernardi

Measuring and mitigating local instability in deep neural networks*
Arghya Datta, Subhrangshu Nandi, Jingcheng Xu, Greg Ver Steeg, He Xie, Anoop Kumar, Aram Galstyan

Reducing cohort bias in natural language understanding systems with targeted self-training scheme
Thu Le, Gabriela Cortes Hernandez, Bei Chen, Melanie Bradford

Privacy

Controlling the extraction of memorized data from large language models via prompt-tuning
Mustafa Ozdayi, Charith Peris, Jack G. M. FitzGerald, Christophe Dupuy, Jimit Majmudar, Haidar Khan, Rahil Parikh, Rahul Gupta

Query rewriting

Context-aware query rewriting for improving users’ search experience on e-commerce websites
Simiao Zuo, Qingyu Yin, Haoming Jiang, Shaohui Xi, Bing Yin, Chao Zhang, Tuo Zhao

Unified contextual query rewriting
Yingxue Zhou, Jie Hao, Mukund Rungta, Yang Liu, Eunah Cho, Xing Fan, Yanbin Lu, Vishal Vasudevan, Kellen Gillespie, Zeynab Raeesy, Sawyer Shen, Edward Guo, Gokhan Tur

Question answering

Accurate training of web-based question answering systems with feedback from ranked users
Liang Wang, Ivano Lauriola, Alessandro Moschitti

Context-aware transformer pre-training for answer sentence selection
Luca Di Liello, Siddhant Garg, Alessandro Moschitti

Cross-Lingual Knowledge Distillation for answer sentence selection in low-resource languages*
Shivanshu Gupta, Yoshitomo Matsubara, Ankit Chadha, Alessandro Moschitti

Exploiting abstract meaning representation for open-domain question answering*
Cunxiang Wang, Zhikun Xu, Qipeng Guo, Xiangkun Hu, Xuefeng Bai, Zheng Zhang, Yue Zhang

Exploiting abstract meaning representation.png
From "Exploiting abstract meaning representation for open-domain question answering".

Hybrid hierarchical retrieval for open-domain question answering*
Manoj Ghuhan Arivazhagan, Lan Liu, Peng Qi, Xinchi Chen, William Wang, Zhiheng Huang

Learning answer generation using supervision from automatic question answering evaluators
Matteo Gabburo, Siddhant Garg, Rik Koncel-Kedziorski, Alessandro Moschitti

RobustQA: Benchmarking the robustness of domain adaptation for open-domain question answering*
Rujun Han, Peng Qi, Yuhao Zhang, Lan Liu, Juliette Burger, William Wang, Zhiheng Huang, Bing Xiang, Dan Roth

Reasoning

FolkScope: Intention knowledge graph construction for e-commerce commonsense discovery*
Changlong Yu, Weiqi Wang, Xin Liu, Jiaxin Bai, Yangqiu Song, Zheng Li, Yifan Gao, Tianyu Cao, Bing Yin

SCOTT: Self-consistent chain-of-thought distillation
Peifeng Wang, Zhengyang Wang, Zheng Li, Yifan Gao, Bing Yin, Xiang Ren

Self-learning

Constrained policy optimization for controlled self-learning in conversational AI systems
Mohammad Kachuee, Sungjin Lee

Scalable and safe remediation of defective actions in self-learning conversational systems
Sarthak Ahuja, Mohammad Kachuee, Fateme Sheikholeslami, Weiqing Liu, Jae Do

Semantic parsing

An empirical analysis of leveraging knowledge for low-resource task-oriented semantic parsing*
Mayank Kulkarni, Aoxiao Zhong, Nicolas Guenon Des Mesnards, Sahar Movaghati, Mukund Harakere, He Xie, Jianhua Lu

XSEMPLR: Cross-lingual semantic parsing in multiple natural languages and meaning representations
Yusen Zhang, Jun Wang, Zhiguo Wang, Rui Zhang

XSemPLR.png
From "XSEMPLR: Cross-lingual semantic parsing in multiple natural languages and meaning representations".

Spoken-language understanding

Regression-free model updates for spoken language understanding
Andrea Caciolai, Verena Weber, Tobias Falke, Alessandro Pedrani, Davide Bernardi

Sharing encoder representations across languages, domains and tasks in large-scale spoken language understanding
Jonathan Hueser, Judith Gaspers, Thomas Gueudre, Chandana Satya Prakash, Jin Cao, Daniil Sorokin, Quynh Do, Nicolas Anastassacos, Tobias Falke, Turan Gojayev, Mariusz Momotko, Denis Romasanta Rodriguez, Austin Doolittle, Kartik Balasubramaniam, Wael Hamza, Fabian Triefenbach, Patrick Lehnen

Toxic-language classification

QCon at SemEval-2023 Task 10: Data augmentation and model ensembling for detection of online sexism
Wes Feely, Prabhakar Gupta, Manas Mohanty, Tim Chon, Tuhin Kundu, Vijit Singh, Sandeep Atluri, Tanya Roosta, Viviane Ghaderi, Peter Schulam, Heba Elfardy

Towards building a robust toxicity predictor
Dmitriy Bespalov, Sourav Bhabesh, Yi Xiang, Yanjun (Jane) Qi

*Accepted to ACL Findings

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US, CA, San Francisco
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Member of Technical Staff - Electronics Engineer, Actuators & Drives, Frontier AI & Robotics
US, CA, San Francisco
Join Amazon's Frontier AI & Robotics team and take ownership of the electronics that make our robots move. As a Member of Technical Staff - Electronics Engineer, Actuators & Drives, you will conceptualize, design, and test the motor drive electronics that power our in-house robotic actuators—from the gate drivers and power stages that command motor current to the sensing circuits and communication interfaces that give our robots proprioceptive awareness. Your printed circuit board (PCB) designs will live inside each of our next-generation robotic systems, directly enabling the embodied intelligence that is central to FAR's mission. Key job responsibilities • Conceptualize, design, and validate motor drive electronics for in-house robotic actuators, including inverter power stages, gate driver circuits, current and position sensing, and power management subsystems from concept through prototype and production • Lead PCB-level design of compact, high-power-density motor drive boards, including schematic capture, component selection, and collaboration with PCB layout engineers to achieve signal integrity, thermal, and EMC requirements in constrained actuator form factors • Characterize and optimize inverter switching performance, efficiency, and thermal behavior across the full operating envelope of FAR's actuator variants, using bench measurements and simulation to guide design decisions • Define and implement current sensing architectures (shunt-based, Hall-effect, or integrated IC-based) and position/velocity sensing interfaces (encoder, resolver, Hall sensor) to support high-bandwidth FOC firmware on microcontrollers and DSPs • Partner with firmware engineers to define hardware-software interfaces for motor drive control loops, fault detection logic, and communication protocols (CAN, EtherCAT, SPI), ensuring electronics designs support the real-time control requirements of robotic actuation • Collaborate with motor design and mechanical engineers to specify the electrical characteristics of custom BLDC and PMSM motors, align inverter design to motor parameters, and validate the integrated actuator electro-mechanical system • Lead hardware bring-up, functional testing, and failure analysis for new actuator electronics prototypes, developing test plans and characterization setups that systematically validate design performance and identify failure modes • Define electronics design standards, review processes, and design-for-manufacturability (DFM) guidelines for FAR's actuator drive portfolio, and mentor junior engineers in motor drive electronics design best practices A day in the life Your day centers on the full electronics development cycle for our custom actuator drive systems. You might start by reviewing simulation results for a new inverter topology, then transition to the lab to characterize switching losses and thermal performance on a prototype motor drive board. Later in the day, you could be collaborating with motor design engineers on back-EMF waveform analysis, refining gate drive timing to optimize inverter efficiency, or working with firmware engineers to define current sensing interfaces and hardware abstraction layers. Across the week, you'll be involved in schematic capture and PCB layout reviews with your design team, participating in design review gates, and iterating on hardware based on test findings. You'll navigate the challenge of fitting high-performance drive electronics into compact, thermally constrained actuator packages—designing for the power density, reliability, and robustness our robots demand. Your work will span from concept and architecture through silicon bring-up, and you'll play a key role in defining the electronics roadmap for FAR's actuator portfolio. About the team Frontier AI & Robotics (FAR) is the team at Amazon building the next generation of embodied intelligence. FAR drives the development and implementation of advanced AI models within Amazon’s operations that enable robots to see, reason, and act on the world around them, supporting a number of different warehouse automation tasks.
Member of Technical Staff - Robotics Mechanical Engineer, Frontier AI & Robotics
US, CA, San Francisco
About the Role: We are looking for a Member of Technical Staff - Mechanical Engineer with a passion for building complex robotic systems from the ground up. This role is ideal for someone with a deep understanding of structural and electromechanical design, who thrives in hands-on environments and has experience taking high-performance robots from concept to production. You will work on the mechanical and system architecture of advanced robotics platforms, including high degree-of-freedom systems, where considerations such as actuator selection, thermal constraints, cabling, sensing integration, and manufacturability are critical. This is a cross-disciplinary role requiring close collaboration with electrical, software, and AI research teams. Beyond day-to-day hardware development, this role also provides exciting avenues to contribute to innovative research projects. Whether you’re interested in mechatronics, sensor integration, or novel actuation methods, you’ll find opportunities to explore your research interests while building real-world systems that advance in the field of high degree-of-freedom robotics. What You Bring: * A systems-thinking mindset with a strong grasp of cross-domain engineering tradeoffs. * A bias toward action: comfortable building, testing, and iterating rapidly. * A collaborative and communicative working style — especially in multi-disciplinary research environments. * A passion for robotics and advancing the state of the art in intelligent, capable machines. Key job responsibilities * Lead mechanical design of robotic subsystems and full platforms, including structures, joints, enclosures, and mechanisms for a research environment. * Own kinematic, dynamic, and structural analyses to guide the design and optimization of full systems and subsystems of high-DoF robots * Specify and integrate actuators and motors for high-torque density applications in high-degree-of-freedom systems. * Contribute to thermal management strategies for motors, sensors, and embedded compute hardware. * Integrate sensors such as lidar, stereo cameras, IMUs, tactile sensors, and compute modules into compact, functional assemblies. * Design and route cabling and wire harnesses, ensuring reliability, serviceability, and thermal/electrical integrity. * Prototype and test mechanical systems; support hands-on builds, debug sessions, and field testing. * Conduct root cause analysis on system-level failures or performance issues and implement design improvements. * Apply Design for Manufacturing (DFM) and Design for Assembly (DFA) principles to transition prototypes into scalable builds (10s–100s of units). * Collaborate with cross-functional teams in electrical engineering, controls, perception, and research to meet research and product goals. About the team Frontier AI & Robotics (FAR) is the team at Amazon building the next generation of embodied intelligence. FAR drives the development and implementation of advanced AI models within Amazon’s operations that enable robots to see, reason, and act on the world around them, supporting a number of different warehouse automation tasks.
Applied Scientist III, Whole Body Control
US, MA, N.reading
Amazon is seeking exceptional talent to help develop the next generation of advanced robotics systems that will transform automation at Amazon's scale. We're building revolutionary robotic systems that combine cutting-edge AI, sophisticated control systems, and advanced mechanical design to create adaptable automation solutions capable of working safely alongside humans in dynamic environments. This is a unique opportunity to shape the future of robotics and automation at an unprecedented scale, working with world-class teams pushing the boundaries of what's possible in robotic dexterous manipulation, locomotion, and human-robot interaction. This role presents an opportunity to shape the future of robotics through innovative applications of deep learning and large language models. At Amazon we leverage advanced robotics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence to solve complex operational challenges at an unprecedented scale. Our fleet of robots operates across hundreds of facilities worldwide, working in sophisticated coordination to fulfill our mission of customer excellence. The ideal candidate will contribute to research that bridges the gap between theoretical advancement and practical implementation in robotics. You will be part of a team that's revolutionizing how robots learn, adapt, and interact with their environment. Join us in building the next generation of intelligent robotics systems that will transform the future of automation and human-robot collaboration. Key job responsibilities - Design and implement whole body control methods for balance, locomotion, and dexterous manipulation - Utilize state-of-the-art in methods in learned and model-based control - Create robust and safe behaviors for different terrains and tasks - Implement real-time controllers with stability guarantees - Collaborate effectively with multi-disciplinary teams to co-design hardware and algorithms for loco-manipulation - Mentor junior engineer and scientists
Applied Scientist II, Foundation Model, Robotics
US, CA, San Francisco
Amazon is seeking exceptional talent to help develop the next generation of advanced robotics systems that will transform automation at Amazon's scale. We're building revolutionary robotic systems that combine cutting-edge AI, sophisticated control systems, and advanced mechanical design to create adaptable automation solutions capable of working safely alongside humans in dynamic environments. This is a unique opportunity to shape the future of robotics and automation at unprecedented scale, working with world-class teams pushing the boundaries of what's possible in robotic manipulation, locomotion, and human-robot interaction. This role presents an opportunity to shape the future of robotics through innovative applications of deep learning and large language models. The ideal candidate will contribute to research that bridges the gap between theoretical advancement and practical implementation in robotics. You will be part of a team that's revolutionizing how robots learn, adapt, and interact with their environment. Join us in building the next generation of intelligent robotics systems that will transform the future of automation and human-robot collaboration. As an Applied Scientist, you will develop and improve machine learning systems that help robots perceive, reason, and act in real-world environments. You will leverage state-of-the-art models (open source and internal research), evaluate them on representative tasks, and adapt/optimize them to meet robustness, safety, and performance needs. You will invent new algorithms where gaps exist. You’ll collaborate closely with research, controls, hardware, and product-facing teams, and your outputs will be used by downstream teams to further customize and deploy on specific robot embodiments. Key job responsibilities As an Applied Scientist in the Foundations Model team, you will: - Leverage state-of-the-art models for targeted tasks, environments, and robot embodiments through fine-tuning and optimization. - Execute rapid, rigorous experimentation with reproducible results and solid engineering practices, closing the gap between sim and real environments. - Build and run capability evaluations/benchmarks to clearly profile performance, generalization, and failure modes. - Contribute to the data and training workflow: collection/curation, dataset quality/provenance, and repeatable training recipes. - Write clean, maintainable, well commented and documented code, contribute to training infrastructure, create tools for model evaluation and testing, and implement necessary APIs - Stay current with latest developments in foundation models and robotics, assist in literature reviews and research documentation, prepare technical reports and presentations, and contribute to research discussions and brainstorming sessions. - Work closely with senior scientists, engineers, and leaders across multiple teams, participate in knowledge sharing, support integration efforts with robotics hardware teams, and help document best practices and methodologies. About the team We leverage advanced robotics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence to solve complex operational challenges at unprecedented scale. Our fleet of robots operates across hundreds of facilities worldwide, working in sophisticated coordination to fulfill our mission of customer excellence. We are pioneering the development of robotics foundation models that: - Enable unprecedented generalization across diverse tasks - Integrate multi-modal learning capabilities (visual, tactile, linguistic) - Accelerate skill acquisition through demonstration learning - Enhance robotic perception and environmental understanding - Streamline development processes through reusable capabilities
Senior Applied Scientist
US, CA, San Francisco
Amazon is seeking an exceptional Sr. Applied Scientist to lead the development of perception systems that harness the power of radar and thermal imaging — enabling robots to perceive and operate reliably in conditions where conventional vision alone falls short. In this role, you will develop ML-driven perception pipelines for non-traditional sensing modalities, pushing the boundaries of what robots can see, understand, and act upon in challenging real-world environments. At Amazon, we leverage advanced robotics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence to solve some of the most complex operational challenges at a scale unlike anywhere else in the world. Our fleet of robots spans hundreds of facilities globally, working in sophisticated coordination to deliver on our promise of customer excellence. As a Sr. Applied Scientist in Multi-Modal Perception, you will apply deep computer vision expertise alongside classical signal processing techniques for radar and thermal imaging — modalities that provide robustness in adverse conditions and sensing capability beyond the visible spectrum. You will develop ML-based methods to extract semantic and geometric information from radar point clouds, radar tensors, and thermal imagery, and fuse these with camera and depth data to build perception systems that are reliable, comprehensive, and ready for deployment at scale. Your work will unlock new capabilities for our robots — enabling reliable detection, classification, and scene understanding in low-visibility conditions, cluttered environments, and scenarios where traditional RGB-based perception is insufficient. You will lead research that translates cutting-edge advances in deep learning and computer vision to these underexplored but high-impact sensing modalities. Join us in building the next generation of multi-modal perception systems that will define the future of autonomous robotics at scale. Key job responsibilities - Lead the research, design, and development of ML-based perception pipelines for radar and thermal/infrared imaging modalities - Develop deep learning models for object detection, classification, segmentation, and tracking using radar data (point clouds, range-Doppler maps, radar tensors) and thermal imagery - Design and implement multi-modal fusion architectures that combine radar, thermal, camera, and depth data for robust, all-condition perception - Develop novel representations and feature extraction methods tailored to the unique characteristics of radar and thermal sensors (sparsity, noise profiles, spectral properties) - Build end-to-end perception systems — from raw sensor data processing and calibration to model training, evaluation, and real-time deployment - Collaborate closely with Hardware, Navigation, Planning, and Controls teams to define sensor configurations and deliver integrated autonomy solutions - Establish benchmarks, datasets, and evaluation frameworks for radar and thermal perception - Mentor scientists and engineers; foster a culture of scientific rigor, innovation, and high-impact delivery - Publish research findings in top-tier venues (CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, ICRA, NeurIPS, etc.) and contribute to patents A day in the life - Train ML models for deployment in simulation and real-world robots, identify and document their limitations post-deployment - Drive technical discussions within your team and with key stakeholders to develop innovative solutions to address identified limitations - Actively contribute to brainstorming sessions on adjacent topics, bringing fresh perspectives that help peers grow and succeed — and in doing so, build lasting trust across the team - Mentor team members while maintaining significant hands-on contribution to technical solutions About the team Our team is a diverse group of scientists and engineers passionate about building intelligent machines. We value curiosity, rigor, and a bias for action. We believe in learning from failure and iterating quickly toward solutions that matter.
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