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Research Area

Conversational AI

Building software and systems that help people communicate with computers naturally, as if communicating with family and friends.
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Publications

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  • Align-Refine: Non-autoregressive speech recognition via iterative realignment
    Ethan A. Chi, Julian Salazar, Katrin Kirchhoff
    NAACL 2021
    2021
    Non-autoregressive encoder-decoder models greatly improve decoding speed over autoregressive models, at the expense of generation quality. To mitigate this, iterative decoding models repeatedly infill or refine the proposal of a non-autoregressive model. However, editing at the level of output sequences limits model flexibility. We instead propose iterative realignment, which by refining latent alignments
    Conversational AI
  • Combining weakly supervised ML techniques for low-resource NLU
    Victor Soto, Konstantine Arkoudas
    NAACL 2021
    2021
    Recent advances in transfer learning have improved the performance of virtual assistants considerably. Nevertheless, creating sophisticated voice-enabled applications for new domains remains a challenge, and meager training data is often a key bottleneck. Accordingly, unsupervised learning and SSL (semisupervised learning) techniques continue to be of vital importance. While a number of such methods have
    Conversational AI
  • Exploiting large-scale teacher-student training for on-device acoustic models
    Jing Liu, Rupak Vignesh Swaminathan, Sree Hari Krishnan Parthasarathi, Chunchuan Lyu, Thanasis Mouchtaris, Siegfried Kunzmann
    TSD 2021
    2021
    We present results from Alexa speech teams on semi-supervised learning (SSL) of acoustic models (AM) with experiments spanning over 3000 hours of GPU time, making our study one of the largest of its kind. We discuss SSL for AMs in a small footprint setting, showing that a smaller capacity model trained with 1 million hours of unsupervised data can outperform a baseline supervised system by 14.3% word error
    Conversational AI
  • On the lack of robust interpretability of neural text classifiers
    Bilal Zafar, Michele Donini, Dylan Slack, Cédric Archambeau, Sanjiv Das, Krishnaram Kenthapadi
    ACL-IJCNLP 2021
    2021
    With the ever-increasing complexity of neural language models, practitioners have turned to methods for understanding the predictions of these models. One of the most well-adopted approaches for model interpretability is feature-based interpretability, i.e., ranking the features in terms of their impact on model predictions. Several prior studies have focused on assessing the fidelity of feature-based interpretability
    Conversational AI
  • Studying the effectiveness of conversational search refinement through user simulation
    Alexandre Salle, Shervin Malmasi, Oleg Rokhlenko, Eugene Agichtein
    ECIR 2021
    2021
    A key application of conversational search is refining a user’s search intent by asking a series of clarification questions, aiming to improve the relevance of search results. Training and evaluating such conversational systems currently requires human participation, making it unfeasible to examine a wide range of user behaviors. To support robust training/evaluation of such systems, we propose a simulation
    Conversational AI
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  • Architecture_comparison.png._CB468461802_.png
    Joint training on speech signal isolation and speech recognition improves performance
    Kenichi Kumatani
    April 1, 2019
    The idea of using arrays of microphones to improve automatic speech recognition (ASR) is decades old. The acoustic signal generated by a sound source reaches multiple microphones with different time delays. This information can be used to create virtual directivity, emphasizing a sound arriving from a direction of interest and diminishing signals coming from other directions. In voice recognition, one of the more popular methods for doing this is known as “beamforming”.
    Conversational AI
  • Audio_watermark.gif._CB468320145_.gif
    Animation by Nick Little
    Audio watermarking algorithm is first to solve "second-screen problem" in real time
    Yuan-Yen Tai
    March 28, 2019
    Audio watermarking is the process of adding a distinctive sound pattern — undetectable to the human ear — to an audio signal to make it identifiable to a computer. It’s one of the ways that video sites recognize copyrighted recordings that have been posted illegally. To identify a watermark, a computer usually converts a digital file into an audio signal, which it processes internally.
    Conversational AI
  • tsne.png._CB469614397_.png
    Adversarial training produces synthetic data for machine learning
    Rahul Gupta
    March 21, 2019
    Sentiment analysis is the attempt, computationally, to determine from someone’s words how he or she feels about something. It has a host of applications, in market research, media analysis, customer service, and product recommendation, among other things. Sentiment classifiers are typically machine learning systems, and any given application of sentiment analysis may suffer from a lack of annotated data for training purposes.
    Conversational AI
  • T-S_architecture.jpg._CB467865187_.jpg
    Machine-labeled data + artificial noise = better speech recognition
    Minhua Wu
    March 20, 2019
    Although deep neural networks have enabled accurate large-vocabulary speech recognition, training them requires thousands of hours of transcribed data, which is time-consuming and expensive to collect. So Amazon scientists have been investigating techniques that will let Alexa learn with minimal human involvement, techniques that fall in the categories of unsupervised and semi-supervised learning.
    Conversational AI
  • Model depicting the stages in the training of an embedding network
    To correct imbalances in training data, don’t oversample: Cluster
    Ming Sun
    March 11, 2019
    In experiments involving sound recognition, technique reduces error rate by 15% to 30%.
    Machine learning
  • knowledge-graph.png._CB453975899_.png
    Innovations from the 2018 Alexa Prize
    Behnam Hedayatnia
    March 5, 2019
    The 2018 Alexa Prize featured eight student teams from four countries, each of which adopted distinctive approaches to some of the central technical questions in conversational AI. We survey those approaches in a paper we released late last year, and the teams themselves go into even greater detail in the papers they submitted to the latest Alexa Prize Proceedings. Here, we touch on just a few of the teams’ innovations.
    Conversational AI
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Applied Science Manager , C360
US, WA, Seattle
We are working on improving shopping on Amazon using the conversational capabilities of large language models and through customer behavioral data to make them more personalized for each customer. We are searching for pioneers who are passionate about technology, innovation, and customer experience, and are ready to make a lasting impact on the industry. In this role, you will be managing a team working on Large Language Model (LLM) and/or Vision-Language Model (VLM) post-training and alignment for new shopping experiences. You’ll be working with talented scientists, engineers, and technical program managers (TPM) to innovate on behalf of our customers. If you’re fired up about being part of a dynamic, driven team, then this is your moment to join us on this exciting journey!
Applied Scientist, Stores Economics & Science (SEAS)
US, WA, Seattle
Stores Economics and Science (SEAS) is an interdisciplinary science and engineering team in Amazon's Stores organization with a peak-jumping mission: we apply expertise in science and engineering to move from local to global optima in methods, models, and software. We pursue this mission by leveraging frontier science; collaborating with partner teams; and learning from the tools, experience, and perspective of others. We scale by solving problems, first in the small to prove concepts, and then in the large by building scalable solutions. We also help other teams within Amazon scale by hiring and developing the best and embedding them in other business units. In 2026, we are focused on economics and science in areas related to (1) lowering cost-to-serve, (2) optimizing selection, and (3) emerging machine learning. We also have some ongoing and highly-leveraged collaborations that help partner teams inside Amazon short-circuit months of R&D or otherwise look around corners. We are looking for an Applied Scientist to build and deliver state-of-the-art science and engineering solutions to improve our Stores business. In this role, you will work in a team of scientists and engineers with backgrounds in machine learning, NLP, IR, statistics, and economics to identify bottlenecks in our business, conceive new ideas to overcome those challenges, and deploy scientific solutions in partnership with product teams. Your responsibilities include developing and maintaining the scientific models, benchmarks, and services. Graduate education or hands-on experience in machine learning, optimization, causal inference, Bayesian statistics, deep learning, or other quantitative scientific fields is a big plus. To be successful in this role, you should be a quick learner and comfortable with a high degree of ambiguity. Key job responsibilities The successful candidate will lead large-scale science initiatives from research to production and translate complex business problems into mathematical frameworks. They will design and implement large-scale algorithms for complex supply chain and marketplace problems, and design incentive-compatible mechanisms for marketplace challenges. The ideal candidate will have a strong publication record in top-tier conferences/journals (INFORMS, EC, WINE, ICML, NeurIPS, etc.) and experience coordinating cross-functional projects. Hands-on experience building science solutions to mechanism design problems (e.g., optimal auction design, welfare maximization under constraints, incentive compatible coordination), with expertise in statistical learning and algorithm development. Leadership responsibilities include influencing technical strategy and roadmaps for complex initiatives, influencing senior stakeholders and shaping technical direction, and fostering team growth.
Applied Scientist II, Sponsored Products
US, NY, New York
The Sponsored Products and Brands team at Amazon Ads is re-imagining the advertising landscape through cutting-edge generative AI technologies, revolutionizing how millions of customers discover products and engage with brands across Amazon.com and beyond. We are at the forefront of re-inventing advertising experiences, bridging human creativity with artificial intelligence to transform every aspect of the advertising lifecycle from ad creation and optimization to performance analysis and customer insights. We are a passionate group of innovators dedicated to developing responsible and intelligent AI technologies that balance the needs of advertisers, enhance the shopping experience, and strengthen the marketplace. If you're energized by solving complex challenges and pushing the boundaries of what's possible with AI, join us in shaping the future of advertising. Key job responsibilities Participate in the Science hiring process as well as mentor other scientists - improving their skills, their knowledge of your solutions, and their ability to get things done. Identify and devise new video related solutions following a customer-obsessed scientific approach to address customer or business problems when the problem is ill-defined, needs to be framed, and new methodologies or paradigms need to be invented at the product level. Articulate potential scientific challenges of ongoing or future customers’ needs or business problems, and present interventions to address them. Independently assess alternative video related technologies, driving evaluation and adoption of those that fit best A day in the life As an Applied Scientist on the Sponsored Brands Video team, you will work with a team of talented and experienced engineers, scientists, and designers to help bring new products to market and ensure that our customers are delighted by what we create. The Sponsored Brands Video team is responsible for the design, development, and implementation of Sponsored Brands Video experiences worldwide. About the team The Sponsored Brands Video team within Sponsored Products and Brands creates relevant and engaging video experiences, connecting advertisers and shoppers. We are on a mission to make Amazon the best in class destination for shoppers to discover, engage and build affinity with brands, making shopping delightful, & personal.
Applied Scientist, Fauna
US, NY, New York
We are seeking an Applied Scientist to lead the development of evaluation frameworks and data collection protocols for robotic capabilities. In this role, you will focus on designing how we measure, stress-test, and improve robot behavior across a wide range of real-world tasks. Your work will play a critical role in shaping how policies are validated and how high-quality datasets are generated to accelerate system performance. You will operate at the intersection of robotics, machine learning, and human-in-the-loop systems, building the infrastructure and methodologies that connect teleoperation, evaluation, and learning. This includes developing evaluation policies, defining task structures, and contributing to operator-facing interfaces that enable scalable and reliable data collection. The ideal candidate is highly experimental, systems-oriented, and comfortable working across software, robotics, and data pipelines, with a strong focus on turning ambiguous capability goals into measurable and actionable evaluation systems. Key job responsibilities - Design and implement evaluation frameworks to measure robot capabilities across structured tasks, edge cases, and real-world scenarios - Develop task definitions, success criteria, and benchmarking methodologies that enable consistent and reproducible evaluation of policies - Create and refine data collection protocols that generate high-quality, task-relevant datasets aligned with model development needs - Build and iterate on teleoperation workflows and operator interfaces to support efficient, reliable, and scalable data collection - Analyze evaluation results and collected data to identify performance gaps, failure modes, and opportunities for targeted data collection - Collaborate with engineering teams to integrate evaluation tooling, logging systems, and data pipelines into the broader robotics stack - Stay current with advances in robotics, evaluation methodologies, and human-in-the-loop learning to continuously improve internal approaches - Lead technical projects from conception through production deployment - Mentor junior scientists and engineers
Applied Scientist, Prime Video - Content Localization, Understanding & Enrichment
US, WA, Seattle
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 subscriptions such as Apple TV+, HBO Max, Peacock, 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 team member, 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! As an Applied Scientist, you will apply state of the art natural language processing and computer vision research to video centric digital media. We are looking for scientists with expertise in vision-language models/multimodal LLMs and long-form content understanding (full movies/episode vs. short clips). You will be dealing with architectures that handle long-context understanding and causal reasoning across extended temporal sequences. Key job responsibilities Our team builds multi-modal machine learning technologies to enrich and understand video content. We aim not only to understand individual components within the content itself, but also their relationships to each other to provide a holistic and broader contextual understanding. This powers the next generation of video understanding and search capabilities for Prime Video. About the team Prime Video's Content Localization, Understanding & Enrichment organization is responsible for 1) enabling Prime Video to "see" and "understand" video content including characters, scenes, dialogue, events & visual elements and 2) delivering localized, accessible content that meets a consistent cinematic quality standard at scale. This team's mission is to deeply understand all content and empower all customers with relevant language options, innovative accessibility assists, and rich title-information across all their content-experiences on Prime Video. We create and publish content on-time that's meaningful, accurate, and accessible to every customer globally. We delight our customers by pushing the boundaries of content understanding and enrichment. Through inclusion and innovation, we do the most fulfilling work of our career.
Data Scientist II, Amazon Currency Convertor
US, WA, Seattle
How to use the world’s richest collection of e-commerce data to improve payments experience for our customers? Amazon Payments Data Science team seeks a Data Scientist for building analytical solutions that will address increasingly complex business questions in the Amazon Currency convertor space. Amazon.com has a culture of data-driven decision-making and demands insights that are timely, accurate, and actionable. This team provides a fast-paced environment where every day brings new challenges and new opportunities. As a Data Scientist in this team, you will be driving the analytics roadmap and will provide descriptive and predictive solutions to the Amazon currency convertor business team through a combination of Gen AI, LLM and other machine learning techniques for text analytics, segmentation and prediction. You will need to collaborate effectively with internal stakeholders, cross-functional teams to solve problems, create operational efficiencies, and deliver successfully against high organizational standards. Key job responsibilities • Understand the applications of causal inference models on real datasets, including assessment of marketing campaigns, online experiments, uplift analysis etc • Understand the business reality behind large sets of data and develop meaningful solutions comprising of analytics as well as marketing management • Work closely with internal stakeholders like the business teams, engineering teams and partner teams and align them with respect to your focus are • Innovate by adapting new modeling techniques and procedures • Effective exploratory data analysis, and model building using industry standard regression and classification techniques such as Random Forest, XGBoost package, Keras framework • Demonstrate thorough technical knowledge Fine Tuning of Amazon LLMs to handle large blocks of text, using Generative AI to solve for summarization tasks and prevent catastrophic forgetting, feature engineering of massive datasets, • Be passionate about working with huge data sets and be someone who loves to bring datasets together to answer business questions. You should have deep expertise in creation and management of datasets • Have exposure at implementing and operating stable, scalable data flow solutions from production systems into end-user facing applications/reports. These solutions will be fault tolerant, self-healing and adaptive
Postdoctoral Researcher – Visual Localization & Navigation | Amazon Last Mile
US, CA, Santa Cruz
Amazon is looking for talented Postdoctoral Scientists to join our research team for a full-time research position focused on visual localization and navigation for real-world applications. Our work focuses on developing next-generation assistive technologies and logistics platforms that rely on robust, scalable visual perception systems. We are building solutions that enable devices and agents to understand, localize within, and navigate complex real-world environments—from indoor spaces with dynamic layouts to large-scale outdoor settings. We are looking for Postdoctoral Scientists to work at the intersection of computer vision, SLAM, and scene understanding—supporting innovations that will be deployed to real systems at global scale. The core technical challenges include building metric-semantic maps of complex environments, performing robust visual relocalization under appearance change, maintaining long-term map consistency, and achieving accurate monocular localization using both geometric and learning-based approaches—all under real-time constraints on real hardware. The solution space is deliberately open-ended. We are looking for researchers who want to push the boundaries of visual localization and spatial AI—and see their work running on real platforms within months. Key job responsibilities In this role you will: * Work closely with a senior science advisor, collaborate with other scientists and engineers, and be part of Amazon’s vibrant and diverse global science community. * Publish your innovation in top-tier academic venues and hone your presentation skills. * Be inspired by challenges and opportunities to invent cutting-edge techniques in your area(s) of expertise. A day in the life 0
Sr Data Scientist, SPX AI Lab, SPX Science
US, WA, Seattle
Amazon Seller Assistant is our flagship GenAI-first, multi-agent system that reimagines Seller experience. Our vision is to provide each seller with a proactive, autonomous, agentic assistant that understands their business and helps them navigate the complexities of selling by anticipating their needs, surfacing insights, resolving issues, taking actions on their behalf, and helping them grow. Amazon Seller Assistant helps millions of sellers on Amazon serve billions of customers worldwide. We are seeking a world-class Senior Data Scientist to help define and build the next generation of Amazon Seller Assistant. You will partner with top-tier scientist, engineers and product teams to launch production-grade agentic capabilities at Amazon's scale — owning your problem space end-to-end, from a crisp customer insight to a shipped product that millions of sellers rely on. Key job responsibilities • Own the science vision, strategy, and roadmap for a key Seller Assistant capability area. • Define and ship agentic experiences — sub-agent onboarding, tool onboarding, evaluations— that solve hard seller problems at scale. • Partner with scientists and engineers to translate frontier AI research into production-grade features sellers trust and depend on. • Design rigorous evaluation frameworks — automated and human-in-the-loop — to measure agent quality, accuracy, and business impact. • Deep-dive into seller data, identify unmet needs, and write compelling PRFAQs that set the direction for your team. • Drive cross-functional alignment across science, engineering, UX, and business teams to deliver with speed and quality. About the team Amazon Seller Assistant team operates at the very frontier of agentic AI and agentic commerce — not as a research group, but as a team shipping production-grade, multi-agent systems used by millions of sellers worldwide. We move with the urgency of a startup and the resources of the world's most customer-obsessed company, the latest breakthroughs in science and engineering into capabilities that sellers rely on every day.
Applied Science Manager, Center for Quantum Computing
US, CA, San Francisco
The Amazon Center for Quantum Computing (CQC) is seeking to hire an Applied Science Manager to lead a team of scientists in the physical design and simulation of superconducting quantum processors. In this role, you will use advanced modeling, simulation, and experimental design to drive improvements in scaling and performance. You will partner with other physics and engineering teams to advance the development of fault-tolerant quantum computers. Key job responsibilities - Hire Applied Scientists from diverse technical backgrounds to design quantum processors and improve the design process - Develop scientific talent through goal setting, feedback, collaborative work, and coaching - Collaborate with other science teams in designing experiments to overcome scaling and performance limitations - Influence engineering team development priorities in enabling systematic processor design and simulation workflows - Manage tactical and strategic initiatives with scientific projects pursued within team - Enable creative and innovative experimentation while striving for operational excellence About the team The Amazon Center for Quantum Computing (CQC) is a multi-disciplinary team of scientists, engineers, and technicians, on a mission to develop a fault-tolerant quantum computer. Inclusive Team Culture Here at Amazon, it’s in our nature to learn and be curious. Our employee-led affinity groups foster a culture of inclusion that empower us to be proud of our differences. Ongoing events and learning experiences, including our Conversations on Race and Ethnicity (CORE) and AmazeCon conferences, inspire us to never stop embracing our uniqueness. Diverse Experiences Amazon values diverse experiences. Even if you do not meet all of the preferred qualifications and skills listed in the job description, we encourage candidates to apply. If your career is just starting, hasn’t followed a traditional path, or includes alternative experiences, don’t let it stop you from applying. Mentorship & Career Growth We’re continuously raising our performance bar as we strive to become Earth’s Best Employer. That’s why you’ll find endless knowledge-sharing, mentorship and other career-advancing resources here to help you develop into a better-rounded professional. Work/Life Balance We value work-life harmony. Achieving success at work should never come at the expense of sacrifices at home, which is why we strive for flexibility as part of our working culture. When we feel supported in the workplace and at home, there’s nothing we can’t achieve in the cloud. Export Control Requirement Due to applicable export control laws and regulations, candidates must be either a U.S. citizen or national, U.S. permanent resident (i.e., current Green Card holder), or lawfully admitted into the U.S. as a refugee or granted asylum, or be able to obtain a US export license. If you are unsure if you meet these requirements, please apply and Amazon will review your application for eligibility.
Data Scientist II - AMZ27351.1
US, CA, San Francisco
Employer: Amazon Web Services, Inc. Position: Data Scientist II - AMZ27351.1 Location: San Francisco, CA Multiple Positions Available: Design and implement scalable and reliable approaches to support or automate decision making throughout the business. Apply a range of data science techniques and tools combined with subject matter expertise to solve difficult business problems and cases in which the solution approach is unclear. Acquire data by building the necessary SQL / ETL queries. Import processes through various company specific interfaces for accessing Oracle, RedShift, and Spark storage systems. Build relationships with stakeholders and counterparts. Analyze data for trends and input validity by inspecting univariate distributions, exploring bivariate relationships, constructing appropriate transformations, and tracking down the source and meaning of anomalies. Build models using statistical modeling, mathematical modeling, econometric modeling, network modeling, social network modeling, natural language processing, machine learning algorithms, genetic algorithms, and neural networks. Validate models against alternative approaches, expected and observed outcome, and other business defined key performance indicators. Implement models that comply with evaluations of the computational demands, accuracy, and reliability of the relevant ETL processes at various stages of production. (40 hours / week, 8:00am-5:00pm, Salary Range $175425 - $212800) Amazon.com is an Equal Opportunity – Affirmative Action Employer – Minority / Female / Disability / Veteran / Gender Identity / Sexual Orientation
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