Foundation Model Development call for proposals — Winter 2024

Advancing the frontiers of foundation model development.

About this CFP

AWS offers a broad and deep set of services for organizations to create meaningful machine learning solutions faster. Our mission is to share our learnings and ML capabilities as fully managed services, and put them into the hands of every scientist and developer.

AWS is soliciting funding proposals related to foundation model (FM) development, including enhancements for dialogue, factual questioning and answering, text generation, document summarization, image generation, and more. Proposals should be expanding the state of the art in terms of training methods, with a focus on one of the following areas: 1) to reduce incorrect or nonsensical answers, 2) to reduce the sensitivity to tweaks to the input prompt, 3) ask clarifying questions when facing ambiguous questions, 4) develop efficiency enhancements across the training and hosting FM lifecycle.

We are inviting work that both critiques and enhances the state-of-the-art in FM, including but not limited to the following topics:

  • Reinforcement learning with human feedback
  • Scaling laws and their inverse, including for model fine-tuning
  • Novel datasets and training methods
  • Distillation with enhanced reasoning
  • Foundation models in novel modalities and domains, such as biology, manufacturing, fashion, etc.
  • Bias detection and mitigation throughout the foundation model lifecycle

AWS aims to advance foundation model development by funding the creation of open-source artifacts, datasets and code that benefit the research community at large, or impactful research that uses machine learning tools. AWS will provide credits for use on EC2 instances powered by AWS Trainium chips to help researchers develop and test solutions at scale. In addition to AWS Trainium, proposed research can be conducted using AWS AI Services, AWS ML Services (Amazon SageMaker, Amazon SageMaker Ground Truth, Amazon SageMaker Neo, and Amazon Augmented AI), and Amazon Bedrock.

Timeline

  • Submission period: January 17 - March 6, 2024 (11:59PM Pacific Time)
  • Decision letters will be sent out in October 2024

Award details

Selected Principal Investigators (PIs) may receive the following:

  • $250,000 in AWS Promotional Credits, which can be used on generally available EC2 instances that are powered by AWS Trainium chips
  • AWS Trainium training resources, including AWS tutorials and hands-on sessions with Amazon scientists and engineers

Awards are structured as one-year unrestricted gifts. The budget should include a list of expected costs specified in USD, and should not include administrative overhead costs.

Your receipt and use of AWS Promotional Credits is governed by the AWS Promotional Credit Terms and Conditions, which may be updated by AWS from time to time.

Eligibility requirements

Please refer to the ARA Program rules on the Rules and Eligibility page.

Proposal requirements

PIs are encouraged to exemplify how their proposed techniques or research studies expand the body of knowledge on pretraining and evaluation methods. PIs should either include plans for open source contributions or state that they do not plan to make any open source contributions (data or code) under the proposed effort. Proposals for this CFP should be prepared according to the proposal template and are encouraged to be a maximum of 5 pages, not including Appendices.

Selection criteria

Funding decisions are based on the creativity and quality of the scientific content, and potential impact to the research community and society at large. AWS may solicit feedback on proposal title and abstracts from select AWS customers, but final award decisions will be made solely by AWS. Proposals will be evaluated based on their express interest in open-sourcing their model artifacts, datasets, and development frameworks. Although usage of Trainium is not a requirement, proposals will be evaluated on their intention to use and explore novel hardware for AI/ML, such as Trainium.

Expectations from recipients

To the extent deemed reasonable, Award recipients should acknowledge the support from ARA. Award recipients will inform ARA of publications, presentations, code and data releases, blogs/social media posts, and other speaking engagements referencing the results of the supported research or the Award. Award recipients are expected to engage with AWS throughout the duration of their award year including, but not limited to, providing reports on the status of their research or updates and feedback to ARA via surveys. Award recipients will have the opportunity to work with ARA on an informational statement about the awarded project that may be used to generate visibility for their institutions and ARA.

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Are you an inventive, curious, and driven Applied Scientist with a strong background in AI, Computer Vision, and Deep Learning? Join Amazon's AGI IMAX Science team and contribute to significant advancements in Computer Vision, Multimodal Understanding, Generative AI, and foundational models. As part of the AGI IMAX Science team, you'll lead innovative research projects and train large-scale Vision-Language Models (VLMs), diffusion models, and multimodal foundation models that directly impact millions of Amazon and AWS customers. Leveraging Amazon's vast computing power, you'll work alongside a supportive and diverse group of skilled scientists and engineers, building models and services that make a meaningful difference in the industry. Key job responsibilities Lead research initiatives in Computer Vision and Multimodal generative AI, advancing model efficiency, accuracy, and scalability. Train and fine-tune large-scale Vision-Language Models (VLMs), diffusion models, and multimodal foundation models at scale. Design, implement, and evaluate deep learning models in a production environment. Collaborate with cross-functional teams to transfer research outcomes into scalable AWS services. Publish in top-tier conferences and journals, keeping Amazon at the forefront of innovation. Mentor and guide other scientists and engineers, fostering a culture of scientific curiosity and excellence.
IL, Tel Aviv
Are you an inventive, curious, and driven Applied Scientist with a strong background in AI, Computer Vision, and Deep Learning? Join Amazon's AGI IMAX Science team and contribute to significant advancements in Computer Vision, Multimodal Understanding, Generative AI, and foundational models. As part of the AGI IMAX Science team, you'll lead innovative research projects and train large-scale Vision-Language Models (VLMs), diffusion models, and multimodal foundation models that directly impact millions of Amazon and AWS customers. Leveraging Amazon's vast computing power, you'll work alongside a supportive and diverse group of skilled scientists and engineers, building models and services that make a meaningful difference in the industry. Key job responsibilities Lead research initiatives in Computer Vision and Multimodal generative AI, advancing model efficiency, accuracy, and scalability. Train and fine-tune large-scale Vision-Language Models (VLMs), diffusion models, and multimodal foundation models at scale. Design, implement, and evaluate deep learning models in a production environment. Collaborate with cross-functional teams to transfer research outcomes into scalable AWS services. Publish in top-tier conferences and journals, keeping Amazon at the forefront of innovation. Mentor and guide other scientists and engineers, fostering a culture of scientific curiosity and excellence.
US, WA, Seattle
Amazon DynamoDB is a fully managed NoSQL database that serves more than 1 million customers and delivers single-digit millisecond performance at any scale. It supports individual tables over 200TB and sustains over half a million requests per second for hundreds of customers, with up to 99.999% availability. Behind that scale sits a large fleet of capacity that must be placed and balanced continuously. We are looking for an Applied Scientist to advance the science of capacity utilization and data placement across the DynamoDB fleet. You will work backwards from customer experience and fleet economics to find where capacity is used inefficiently, where scaling bottlenecks constrain the service, and where smarter data placement can raise utilization without degrading latency or availability. You will turn these findings into models and algorithms that inform capacity profile decisions and placement policy. You will partner closely with the DynamoDB teams to bring your inputs into production decisions. This is a customer-obsessed science role for a self-driven scientist. Many of the problems are not yet well defined and no textbook solution exists. You will frame the problem, extend state-of-the-art approaches or invent new ones, and drive the work to production impact with a strong bias for action. Key job responsibilities Identify capacity usage optimization opportunities across the DynamoDB fleet. Quantify the customer and cost impact of each opportunity. - Model the scaling bottlenecks of the service and characterize how they constrain placement and utilization. - Develop data placement approaches that balance customer experience (latency, availability, throughput headroom) against optimal capacity utilization. - Partner with the DynamoDB performance team to incorporate your inputs into capacity profile decisions and placement policy. Validate impact with production data. - Build components that integrate directly into production systems or that directly support the large systems making placement and capacity decisions. - Scrutinize the performance of your algorithms and software during implementation. Resolve root causes and leave systems easier to maintain. - Author or co-author papers for internal or external peer-reviewed venues when the work is novel and business considerations allow.
US, WA, Seattle
The Sponsored Products and Brands (SPB) team at Amazon Ads is re-imagining the advertising landscape through state-of-the-art 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 This role will be pivotal in redesigning how ads contribute to a personalized, relevant, and inspirational shopping experience, with the customer value proposition at the forefront. Key responsibilities include, but are not limited to: - Contribute to the design and development of GenAI, deep learning, multi-objective optimization and/or reinforcement learning empowered solutions to transform ad retrieval, auctions, whole-page relevance, and/or bespoke shopping experiences. - Collaborate cross-functionally with other scientists, engineers, and product managers to bring scalable, production-ready science solutions to life. - Stay abreast of industry trends in GenAI, LLMs, and related disciplines, bringing fresh and innovative concepts, ideas, and prototypes to the organization. - Contribute to the enhancement of team’s scientific and technical rigor by identifying and implementing best-in-class algorithms, methodologies, and infrastructure that enable rapid experimentation and scaling. - Mentor and grow junior scientists and engineers, cultivating a high-performing, collaborative, and intellectually curious team. A day in the life As an Applied Scientist on the Sponsored Products and Brands Off-Search team, you will contribute to the development in Generative AI (GenAI) and Large Language Models (LLMs) to revolutionize our advertising flow, backend optimization, and frontend shopping experiences. This is a rare opportunity to redefine how ads are retrieved, allocated, and/or experienced—elevating them into personalized, contextually aware, and inspiring components of the customer journey. You will have the opportunity to fundamentally transform areas such as ad retrieval, ad allocation, whole-page relevance, and differentiated recommendations through the lens of GenAI. By building novel generative models grounded in both Amazon’s rich data and the world’s collective knowledge, your work will shape how customers engage with ads, discover products, and make purchasing decisions. If you are passionate about applying frontier AI to real-world problems with massive scale and impact, this is your opportunity to define the next chapter of advertising science. About the team The Off-Search team within Sponsored Products and Brands (SPB) is focused on building delightful ad experiences across various surfaces beyond Search on Amazon—such as product detail pages, the homepage, and store-in-store pages—to drive monetization. Our vision is to deliver highly personalized, context-aware advertising that adapts to individual shopper preferences, scales across diverse page types, remains relevant to seasonal and event-driven moments, and integrates seamlessly with organic recommendations such as new arrivals, basket-building content, and fast-delivery options. To execute this vision, we work in close partnership with Amazon Stores stakeholders to lead the expansion and growth of advertising across Amazon-owned and -operated pages beyond Search. We operate full stack—from backend ads-retail edge services, ads retrieval, and ad auctions to shopper-facing experiences—all designed to deliver meaningful value. Curious about our advertising solutions? Discover more about Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands to see how we’re helping businesses grow on Amazon.com and beyond!
IL, Tel Aviv
We are seeking an Applied Scientist to help build Amazon’s next-generation customer memory and personalization systems. Are you interested in building systems that move beyond reacting to customer behavior, to actually understanding and remembering it over time? Our team is building Amazon’s customer memory layer – a system that extracts, curates, and reasons over customer knowledge to power next-generation personalization. This includes transforming noisy, unstructured signals into durable, high-quality representations of customer preferences, intents, and life events, and using them in real time to improve customer experiences. We are part of Amazon’s Personalization organization, a high-performing group that leverages large-scale machine learning, generative AI, and distributed systems to deliver highly relevant customer experiences. We tackle challenging problems at the intersection of information extraction, knowledge representation, LLM reasoning, and recommendation systems. Our systems operate under real-world constraints of scale, latency, and quality, requiring careful tradeoffs between precision, recall, and responsiveness. This team plays a central role in defining how Amazon understands its customers, and how that understanding is applied across the shopping experience. As an Applied Scientist, you will design and build ML and LLM-powered solutions for Amazon's customer memory and personalization systems. You will work on how customer knowledge is extracted, validated, and applied in production systems. You will own the end-to-end delivery of ML solutions, from problem formulation and modeling to offline and online experimentation, and production deployment at scale. You will deliver high-quality, scalable systems that power customer-facing experiences. You will drive work across areas such as fact extraction, memory quality and lifecycle, temporal reasoning, and grounded personalization, while navigating tradeoffs between quality, latency, and coverage. You will collaborate closely with engineering and product teams to translate research into measurable customer impact. Please visit https://www.amazon.science for more information.
US, NY, New York
The Ads Measurement Science team in the Measurement, Ad Tech, and Data Science (MADS) team of Amazon Ads serves a centralized role developing solutions for a multitude of performance measurement products. We create solutions which measure the comprehensive impact of their ad spend, including sales impacts both online and offline and across timescales, and provide actionable insights that enable our advertisers to optimize their media portfolios. We leverage a host of scientific technologies to accomplish this mission, including Generative AI, classical ML, Causal Inference, Natural Language Processing, and Computer Vision. We are hiring an Economist on the team to develop the next generation of incrementality measurement products, capturing the effect of advertising in driving sales as well as the effects of measurement tools on advertiser engagement with Amazon. As an Economist on the team, you will lead the design, implementation, and validation of large-scale causal inference methodologies to capture these properties. You will communicate your results with science and business leaders, and partner with other scientists and engineers to carry solutions into production. Key job responsibilities Leverage deep expertise in causal inference to develop robust, causally grounded ads measurement solutions Disambiguate problems to propose clear evaluation frameworks and success criteria Work autonomously and write high quality technical documents Partner closely with other scientists to deliver large, multi-faceted technical projects Share and publish works with the broader scientific community through meetings and conferences Communicate clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences and leaders Contribute new ideas that shape the direction of the team's work Mentor more junior scientists and participate in the hiring process
US, NY, New York
The Ads Measurement Science team in the Measurement, Ad Tech, and Data Science (MADS) team of Amazon Ads serves a centralized role developing solutions for a multitude of performance measurement products. We create solutions which measure the comprehensive impact of advertiser's ad spend, including sales impacts both online and offline and across timescales, and provide actionable insights that enable our advertisers to optimize their media portfolios. We also own the science solutions for AI tools that unlock new insights and automate high-effort customer workflows, such as custom query and report generation based on natural language user requests. We leverage a host of scientific technologies to accomplish this mission, including Generative AI, classical ML, Causal Inference, Natural Language Processing, and Computer Vision. As an Applied Scientist on the team, you will lead measurement solutions end-to-end from inception to production. You will propose, design, analyze, and productionize models to provide novel measurement insights to our customers. Key job responsibilities Leverage deep expertise in one or more scientific disciplines to invent solutions to ambiguous ads measurement problems Disambiguate problems to propose clear evaluation frameworks and success criteria Work autonomously and write high quality technical documents Implement a significant portion of critical-path code, and partner with engineers to directly carry solutions into production Partner closely with other scientists to deliver large, multi-faceted technical projects Share and publish works with the broader scientific community through meetings and conferences Communicate clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences Contribute new ideas that shape the direction of the team's work Mentor more junior scientists and participate in the hiring process About the team We are a team of scientists across Applied, Research, Data Science and Economist disciplines. You will work with colleagues with deep expertise in ML, NLP, CV, Gen AI, and Causal Inference with a diverse range of backgrounds. We partner closely with top-notch engineers, product managers, sales leaders, and other scientists with expertise in the ads industry and on building scalable modeling and software solutions.
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Amazon Research Awards

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