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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This role will contribute to developing the Economics and Science products and services in the Fee domain, with specialization in supply chain systems and fees. Through the lens of economics, you will develop causal links for how Amazon, Sellers and Customers interact. You will be a key and senior scientist, advising Amazon leaders how to price our services. You will work on developing frameworks and scaleable, repeatable models supporting optimal pricing and policy in the two-sided marketplace that is central to Amazon's business. The pricing for Amazon services is complex. You will partner with science and technology teams across Amazon including Advertising, Supply Chain, Operations, Prime, Consumer Pricing, and Finance. We are looking for an experienced Principal Economist to improve our understanding of seller Economics, enhance our ability to estimate the causal impact of fees, and work with partner teams to design pricing policy changes. In this role, you will provide guidance to scientists to develop econometric models to influence our fee pricing worldwide. You will lead the development of causal models to help isolate the impact of fee and policy changes from other business actions, using experiments when possible, or observational data when not. Key job responsibilities The ideal candidate will have extensive Economics knowledge, demonstrated strength in practical and policy relevant structural econometrics, strong collaboration skills, proven ability to lead highly ambiguous and large projects, and a drive to deliver results. They will work closely with Economists, Data / Applied Scientists, Strategy Analysts, Data Engineers, and Product leads to integrate economic insights into policy and systems production. Familiarity with systems and services that constitute seller supply chains is a plus but not required. About the team The Stores Economics and Sciences team is a central science team that supports Amazon's Retail and Supply Chain leadership. We tackle some of Amazon's most challenging economics and machine learning problems, where our mandate is to impact the business on massive scale.
AU, VIC, Melbourne
Are you excited about leveraging and extending state-of-the-art Deep Learning, Information Retrieval, Natural Language Processing, Computer Vision algorithms to solve customer problems at the scale of Amazon? As an Applied Scientist Intern, you will be working in the Melbourne office in a fast-paced, cross-disciplinary team of experienced R&D scientists. You will take on complex problems, work on solutions that leverage existing academic and industrial research, and utilize your own out-of-the-box pragmatic thinking. In addition to coming up with novel solutions and prototypes, you may even deliver these to production in customer facing products. Key job responsibilities - Develop novel solutions and build prototypes - Work on complex problems in Deep Learning and Generative AI - Contribute to research that could significantly impact Amazon operations - Collaborate with a diverse team of experts in a fast-paced environment - Present your research findings to both technical and non-technical audiences - Collaborate with scientists on writing and submitting papers to top ML conferences, e.g. NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, AISTATS, ACL ICCV, CVPR, KDD. Key Opportunities: - Work in a team of ML scientists to solve applied science problems at the scale of Amazon - Access to Amazon services and hardware - Potentially deliver solutions to production in customer-facing applications - Opportunities to be hired full-time after the internship Join us in shaping the future of AI at Amazon. Apply now and turn your research into real-world solutions!
US, CA, Pasadena
Work with the inventor of control barrier functions in the Safe Autonomy Frontiers (SAF) Lab. The first industry research lab in safe autonomy, developing a universal safety layer for the next generation of robotic systems: mobile robots, manipulators, mobile manipulators, and future platforms with dynamic stability. You will push the frontiers of performant safety for highly dynamic robots: CBF theory integrated with perception and learning, evaluated on next-generation robots. Your work will underpin robots operating alongside people at Amazon's unprecedented scale. We are seeking a Postdoctoral Scholar to join the SAF Lab. In this role, you will perform research around safe autonomy on highly dynamic robots, with a special focus on loco-manipulation and dynamically stable robots. This includes, but is not limited to, underlying theory of control barrier functions (CBFs) that enables robust and performant safety on hardware, safe reinforcement learning for agile and robust whole-body control, layered safety filters that interface with learning modules, and the synthesis of CBFs from perception data and semantic information. You will push the boundaries of safe autonomy and validate your discoveries experimentally on the next generation of robotic platforms. The SAF lab provides a unique opportunity to collaborate with the inventor of CBFs, top scientists and engineers at Amazon developing the next generation of safe autonomy, while also establishing strong connections with top academic research labs. Your research in the SAF lab will lay the foundations of safe learning on complex robots – removing bottlenecks to deployment and enable them to safely operate around humans. Key job responsibilities In this role you will: • Push forward the fundamental science of safe autonomy. This can be from a variety of perspectives: theoretic contributions, integration with learning, or synthesis from perception. Especially valuable are methods that bridge these different domains. • Develop the simulation and evaluation pipelines needed to run complex and large-scale validation of methods developed in high fidelity simulation environments. • Develop sim-to-real transfer pipelines that enable the deployment of simulation-based methods (controllers, policies) on hardware. • Deploy the methods developed on hardware, with a focus on dynamically stable robots. Validate the underlying science developed in practice and identify gaps between the science and practice to drive innovation in research. • Publish research at top-tier robotics, control and ML venues and contribute to Amazon's scientific reputation in advanced robotics • Collaborate with product teams and science leaders to set a science roadmap (with eventual impact on real robots). A day in the life 0
US, CA, Pasadena
Work with the inventor of control barrier functions in the Safe Autonomy Frontiers (SAF) Lab. The first industry research lab in safe autonomy, developing a universal safety layer for the next generation of robotic systems: mobile robots, manipulators, mobile manipulators, and future platforms with dynamic stability. You will push the frontiers of performant safety for highly dynamic robots: CBF theory integrated with perception and learning, evaluated on next-generation robots. Your work will underpin robots operating alongside people at Amazon's unprecedented scale We are seeking a Postdoctoral Scholar to join the SAF Lab. In this role, you will perform research around safe autonomy on highly dynamic robots, with a special focus on loco-manipulation and dynamically stable robots. This includes, but is not limited to, underlying theory of control barrier functions (CBFs) that enables robust and performant safety on hardware, safe reinforcement learning for agile and robust whole-body control, layered safety filters that interface with learning modules, and the synthesis of CBFs from perception data and semantic information. You will push the boundaries of safe autonomy and validate your discoveries experimentally on the next generation of robotic platforms. The SAF lab provides a unique opportunity to collaborate with the inventor of CBFs, top scientists and engineers at Amazon developing the next generation of safe autonomy, while also establishing strong connections with top academic research labs. Your research in the SAF lab will lay the foundations of safe learning on complex robots – removing bottlenecks to deployment and enable them to safely operate around humans. Key job responsibilities In this role you will: • Push forward the fundamental science of safe autonomy. This can be from a variety of perspectives: theoretic contributions, integration with learning, or synthesis from perception. Especially valuable are methods that bridge these different domains. • Develop the simulation and evaluation pipelines needed to run complex and large-scale validation of methods developed in high fidelity simulation environments. • Develop sim-to-real transfer pipelines that enable the deployment of simulation-based methods (controllers, policies) on hardware. • Deploy the methods developed on hardware, with a focus on dynamically stable robots. Validate the underlying science developed in practice and identify gaps between the science and practice to drive innovation in research. • Publish research at top-tier robotics, control and ML venues and contribute to Amazon's scientific reputation in advanced robotics • Collaborate with product teams and science leaders to set a science roadmap (with eventual impact on real robots). A day in the life 0
US, CA, Pasadena
Work with the inventor of control barrier functions in the Safe Autonomy Frontiers (SAF) Lab. The first industry research lab in safe autonomy, developing a universal safety layer for the next generation of robotic systems: mobile robots, manipulators, mobile manipulators, and future platforms with dynamic stability. You will push the frontiers of performant safety for highly dynamic robots: CBF theory integrated with perception and learning, evaluated on next-generation robots. Your work will underpin robots operating alongside people at Amazon's unprecedented scale We are seeking a Postdoctoral Scholar to join the SAF Lab. In this role, you will perform research around safe autonomy on highly dynamic robots, with a special focus on loco-manipulation and dynamically stable robots. This includes, but is not limited to, underlying theory of control barrier functions (CBFs) that enables robust and performant safety on hardware, safe reinforcement learning for agile and robust whole-body control, layered safety filters that interface with learning modules, and the synthesis of CBFs from perception data and semantic information. You will push the boundaries of safe autonomy and validate your discoveries experimentally on the next generation of robotic platforms. The SAF lab provides a unique opportunity to collaborate with the inventor of CBFs, top scientists and engineers at Amazon developing the next generation of safe autonomy, while also establishing strong connections with top academic research labs. Your research in the SAF lab will lay the foundations of safe learning on complex robots – removing bottlenecks to deployment and enable them to safely operate around humans. Key job responsibilities In this role you will: • Push forward the fundamental science of safe autonomy. This can be from a variety of perspectives: theoretic contributions, integration with learning, or synthesis from perception. Especially valuable are methods that bridge these different domains. • Develop the simulation and evaluation pipelines needed to run complex and large-scale validation of methods developed in high fidelity simulation environments. • Develop sim-to-real transfer pipelines that enable the deployment of simulation-based methods (controllers, policies) on hardware. • Deploy the methods developed on hardware, with a focus on dynamically stable robots. Validate the underlying science developed in practice and identify gaps between the science and practice to drive innovation in research. • Publish research at top-tier robotics, control and ML venues and contribute to Amazon's scientific reputation in advanced robotics • Collaborate with product teams and science leaders to set a science roadmap (with eventual impact on real robots). A day in the life 0
DE, BE, Berlin
Amazon Music is an immersive audio entertainment service that deepens connections between fans, artists, and creators. From personalized music playlists to exclusive podcasts, concert livestreams to artist merch, Amazon Music is innovating at some of the most exciting intersections of music and culture. We offer experiences that serve all listeners with our different tiers of service: Prime members get access to all the music in shuffle mode, and top ad-free podcasts, included with their membership; customers can upgrade to Amazon Music Unlimited for unlimited, on-demand access to 100 million songs, including millions in HD, Ultra HD, and spatial audio; and anyone can listen for free by downloading the Amazon Music app or via Alexa-enabled devices. Join us for the opportunity to influence how Amazon Music engages fans, artists, and creators on a global scale. Learn more at https://www.amazon.com/music The Data, Insights, Science and Optimization, Music Product and Tech (DISCO MPT) team is looking for a Data Scientist to join a team of scientists and engineers who analyze big data, provide analytics and insights and build models and algorithms to power Music product experiences. In this role, you will set the science vision and direction for the team and collaborate with internal stakeholders across product, science and finance to scale and advance our science offerings. You will lead large scale science solutions, prioritize across multiple stakeholders and projects and be part of a fast-paced, dynamic and fun environment. Key job responsibilities • Lead the research and development of models and science products powering personalized recommendations • Partner with product leaders at Amazon Music to develop science-driven business strategies • Partner with science, marketing and product teams across Amazon Entertainment and subscription businesses • Educate internal teams on analytics, insights and measurement • Develop models to determine drivers of key performance metrics, and automate the process of deep diving into variances • Collaborate with product and engineering teams to evaluate the impact of new features or algorithms (e.g., the Playlist Song Recommendation experiments) • Analyze the results of experiments and provide recommendations to optimize solutions • Partner with Data Engineers to develop new product based on GenAI technology • Write high quality production code About the team The DISCO team focuses on accelerating Amazon Music customer growth by empowering product teams to make sound, customer-centric decisions through data and insights. We build data pipelines, self-service analytics, insights and predictive models enabling acquisition, engagement and retention at scale with personalized customer touchpoints.
US, CA, San Francisco
Amazon Industrial Robotics is on a mission to redefine the future of automation — and we're looking for exceptional talent to help lead the way. We are building the next generation of advanced robotic systems that seamlessly blend cutting-edge AI, sophisticated control systems, and novel mechanical design to create adaptable, intelligent automation solutions capable of operating safely alongside humans in dynamic, real-world environments. At Amazon Industrial Robotics, we leverage the power of machine learning, artificial intelligence, and advanced robotics 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 — and we're just getting started. As a Sr. Applied Scientist in Robot Perception, you will be at the forefront of this transformation. You will develop and deploy state-of-the-art perception algorithms that enable robots to truly understand and interact with the physical world — bridging the gap between theoretical research and realworld impact. Bringing deep expertise in Computer Vision and a nuanced understanding of the capabilities and limitations of modern Vision-Language Models (VLMs), you will innovate boldly and push the boundaries of what's possible. Our vision for the Perception layer is ambitious: to enable seamless, intelligent interaction between the user, the robot, and its environment. This is a rare opportunity to work at the intersection of deep learning, large language models, and robotics — contributing to research that doesn't just advance the field, but reshapes it. You will collaborate with world-class teams pioneering breakthroughs in dexterous manipulation, locomotion, and humanrobot interaction, all at an unprecedented scale. Key job responsibilities Design, develop, and deploy perception algorithms for robotics systems, including object detection, segmentation, tracking, depth estimation, and scene understanding • Lead research initiatives in computer vision, sensor fusion and 3D perception • Collaborate with cross-functional teams including robotics engineers, software engineers, and product managers to define and deliver perception capabilities • Drive end-to-end ownership of ML models — from data collection and labeling strategy to training, evaluation, and deployment • Mentor junior scientists and engineers; contribute to a culture of technical excellence • Define and track key metrics to measure perception system performance in real-world environments • 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 Industrial Robotics Group 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.
US, CA, Palo Alto
In Amazon Advertising, we apply Machine Learning at massive scale to optimize programmatic advertising performance. The Demand Tech team owns response prediction and incrementality models that power bid optimization across Amazon DSP and Sponsored Display — determining how billions of ad impressions are valued and served daily across Amazon-owned properties, the open internet, and third-party exchanges. We are looking for a talented Senior Applied Scientist to join our team of scientists and engineers working on high-impact prediction systems that directly drive advertiser KPIs (CPA, ROAS, incrementality) across endemic and non-endemic programmatic advertising. What you will do: Own end-to-end response prediction — design and improve deep learning models for multi-task prediction (click, conversion, page view, incrementality) serving at inference latencies under 10ms at millions of TPS Build and iterate on calibration mechanisms that keep prediction accuracy stable across rapidly shifting supply distributions Integrate novel signals (OpenRTB features, customer behavioral sequences, supply quality feeds) into production models to improve optimization quality Run online A/B experiments at scale, analyze results with statistical rigor, and translate offline gains into measurable business impact Collaborate closely with engineers on model serving infrastructure (SageMaker, GPU inference, real-time feature stores) to deploy models efficiently at scale Mentor scientists on the team and contribute to the broader Amazon ML science community through papers, conferences, and internal deep dives What makes this role unique: Direct business impact: Your models determine bid prices for billions of daily ad impressions — a 1% prediction improvement translates to tens of millions in advertiser value Technical depth at scale: Multi-task deep learning architectures serving real-time inference across multiple global regions under strict latency constraints Diverse problem space: From signal-sparse open internet prediction to calibration under distribution shift, from incrementality measurement to cost-efficient GPU inference Autonomy and ownership: End-to-end ownership from problem framing through research, experimentation, production deployment, and business metric monitoring Impact and career growth: Amazon is investing heavily in building a world-class advertising business. Your work directly influences how Amazon's advertising products optimize campaign performance for advertisers worldwide. You will work with a highly motivated, collaborative team with a broad mandate to experiment and innovate. You will have opportunities to present to senior leadership, define long-term science vision, attend external conferences (NeurIPS, KDD, ICML), and shape the direction of ML-driven advertising at Amazon.
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Amazon Research Awards

Collaborating with scientists around the world to fund research, share knowledge and encourage innovation.