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Foundation Model Development call for proposals — Winter 2024

Advancing the frontiers of foundation model development.

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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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Senior Applied Scientist, Catalog System Services Science
US, WA, Seattle
At Amazon Selection and Catalog Systems (ASCS), our mission is to power the online buying experience for customers worldwide so they can find, discover, and buy any product they want. We innovate on behalf of our customers to ensure uniqueness and consistency of product identity and to infer relationships between products in Amazon Catalog to drive the selection gateway for the search and browse experiences on the website. We're solving a fundamental AI challenge: establishing product relevant information at unprecedented scale with Frontier Models and Agents. The scale is staggering: billions of products, petabytes of multimodal data, millions of sellers, dozens of languages, and infinite product diversity ranging from electronics to groceries to digital content. The research challenges are immense. GenAI and VLMs hold transformative promise for catalog understanding, but we operate where traditional methods fail: ambiguous problem spaces, incomplete and noisy data, inherent uncertainty, reasoning across both images and textual data, and explaining decisions at scale. Enriching product information requires sophisticated models that reason across text, images, and structured data, all while maintaining accuracy and trust for high-stakes business decisions affecting millions of customers daily. Amazon's Catalog System Services Science team is looking for an innovative and customer-focused applied scientist to help us make the world's best product catalog even better. In this role, you will partner with technology and business leaders to build new state-of-the-art algorithms, models, and services. You will pioneer advanced GenAI solutions that power next-generation agentic shopping experiences, working in a collaborative environment where you can experiment with massive data from the world's largest product catalog, tackle problems at the frontier of AI research, rapidly implement and deploy your algorithmic ideas at scale, across millions of customers. Key job responsibilities * Formulate novel research problems at the intersection of GenAI, multimodal learning, and large-scale information retrieval. In essence, translating ambiguous business challenges into tractable scientific frameworks * Design and implement leading models leveraging frontier models, and agentic architectures to enrich catalog information at billion-product scale * Pioneer explainable AI methodologies that balance model performance with scalability requirements for production systems impacting millions of daily customer decisions * Own end-to-end ML pipelines from research ideation to production deployment, processing petabytes of multimodal data with rigorous evaluation frameworks * Define research roadmaps aligned with business priorities, balancing foundational research with incremental product improvements * Mentor peer scientists and engineers on advanced ML techniques, experimental design, and scientific rigor, building organizational capability in GenAI and multimodal AI * Represent the team in the broader science community - publishing findings, delivering tech talks, and staying at the forefront of GenAI, VLM, and agentic system research
Manager, Research Science, Special Projects
US, WA, Seattle
Innovators wanted! Are you an entrepreneur? A builder? A dreamer? This role is part of an Amazon Special Projects team that takes the company’s Think Big leadership principle to the extreme. We focus on creating entirely new products and services with a goal of positively impacting the lives of our customers. No industries or subject areas are out of bounds. If you’re interested in innovating at scale to address big challenges in the world, this is the team for you. Here at Amazon, we embrace our differences. We are committed to furthering our culture of inclusion. We have thirteen employee-led affinity groups, reaching 40,000 employees in over 190 chapters globally. We are constantly learning through programs that are local, regional, and global. Amazon’s culture of inclusion is reinforced within our 16 Leadership Principles, which remind team members to seek diverse perspectives, learn and be curious, and earn trust. Our team highly values work-life balance, mentorship and career growth. We believe striking the right balance between your personal and professional life is critical to life-long happiness and fulfillment. We care about your career growth and strive to assign projects and offer training that will challenge you to become your best.
Applied Scientist II, Alexa Ads
IN, KA, Bengaluru
Alexa+ is the world’s best Generative AI powered personal assistant / agent for consumers, and is becoming the conversational AI interface for Amazon services with the launch of Alexa for Shopping on Amazon.com and Amazon mobile app. At Alexa Ads, we are creating industry's first and most advanced Agentic Advertising products to drive Agentic Commerce. We are seeking an Applied Scientist to join our newly expanding team in India focused on Alexa Agentic/Conversational Ads and Personalization. In this role, you will build machine learning models that seamlessly and naturally integrate relevant advertising into the Alexa experience while deeply personalizing user interactions. You will work closely with other scientists, engineers, and product managers to take models from conception to production. Key job responsibilities - Design, develop, and evaluate innovative machine learning and deep learning models for natural language processing (NLP), recommendation systems, and personalization. - Conduct hands-on data analysis and build scalable ML pipelines. - Design and run A/B experiments to measure the impact of new models on customer experience and ad performance. - Collaborate with software development engineers to deploy models into high-scale, real-time production environments. About the team We are building a new science team in Bangalore to solve some of the most impactful problems in computational advertising. This isn't about tweaking existing models as we are rethinking how ads are ranked, priced, and personalized across voice-first and screen-first surfaces. These are problems that don't have textbook solutions. Key points to note about the team: 🧪 Greenfield team - you are not joining a mature org with rigid processes. You will shape the science roadmap, pick the problems, and define the culture from day one. 📈 Direct business impact — your models directly drive revenue. No yearly cycles to see if your work matters. 🌏 Global scope, local autonomy — collaborate with scientists and engineers across Seattle, Sunnyvale, and Bangalore, but own your problem space end-to-end. 🎓 Ship AND Publish: We encourage top-tier publications (NeurIPS, ACL, EMNLP, KDD, ICML, WWW) while ensuring your research hits production.
Sr. Applied Scientist, Fauna Robotics
US, CA, Sunnyvale
We are seeking an Applied Scientist to focus on Robotics Localization, Mapping, and Geometric Reconstruction. In this role, you'll research and build advanced SLAM and World Reconstruction algorithms that enable robots to know its pose in the world and fulfill various tasks in complex and dynamic home environments. You'll work across a broad spectrum of visual inertial odometry, 3D pose estimation, mapping, and geometric reconstruction problems to build robust solutions that support autonomous decision making, task planning, navigation, and manipulation. Key job responsibilities - Develop and implement robust robot state estimation, pose estimation, mapping, and reconstruction algorithms. - Build simulation-based and on-robot evaluation frameworks with comprehensive benchmarks and metrics for systematic evaluation of our spatial intelligence stack. - Lead scientific and technical projects across the spatial intelligence team. - Collaborate with navigation, manipulation, and other teams to ensure seamless integration of localization, tracking, and mapping capabilities. - Mentor junior scientists and engineers to solve real-world robotics problems. About the team Fauna Robotics, an Amazon company, is building capable, safe, and genuinely delightful robots for everyday life. Our goal is simple: make robots people actually want to live and interact with in everyday human spaces. We believe that future won’t arrive until building for robotics becomes far more accessible. Today, too much effort is spent reinventing the fundamentals. We’re changing that by developing tightly integrated hardware and software systems that make it faster, safer, and more intuitive to create real-world robotic products. Our work spans the full stack: mechanical design, control systems, dynamic modeling, and intelligent software. The focus is not just functionality, but experience. We’re building robots that feel responsive, expressive, and genuinely useful. At Fauna, you’ll work at the frontier of this space, helping define how robots move, manipulate, and interact with people in natural environments. It’s an opportunity to solve hard problems across hardware and software with a team focused on making robotics accessible and joyful to build. If you care about making robotics real for everyone and building systems that are as delightful as they are capable, we’re interested in hearing from you.
Applied Scientist, JP OPS STAR
JP, 13, Tokyo
Every day, Amazon Japan delivers millions of packages to customers' doors. Behind every routing decision, capacity plan, and network design is a modeling problem — and the science behind how those models learn, generalize, and improve in production is where you come in. JP OPS STAR Foundation is the applied science and engineering team that builds the decision systems powering Amazon Japan's transportation operations. We sit at the intersection of generative AI, large-scale optimization, and graph-based learning — developing models that turn complex operational structure into actionable intelligence. As an applied scientist, you will formulate and solve research problems that directly shape operational outcomes. Your work will span: - LLM-based agent systems — designing agentic architectures with structured evaluation frameworks that measure reasoning quality, tool use accuracy, and task completion under real operational constraints - GPU-optimized model serving and training — developing pipelines for large model inference and fine-tuning, with rigorous benchmarking of latency, throughput, and cost trade-offs - Graph representation learning — building graph neural network models that capture logistics network topology and learn node/edge representations for downstream prediction and optimization tasks You will own problems end-to-end: from formulation and experimentation through deployment and continuous measurement in production. We expect scientific rigor — well-designed experiments, proper baselines, quantified uncertainty — and the engineering judgment to make your methods work reliably at scale. This is a high-autonomy, high-impact role. You will collaborate with data engineers, BIEs, and operations leaders, and you will have the freedom to define your research agenda within our problem space. We value scientists who publish and share their work, and who treat production performance as ground truth for their ideas. At Amazon, you'll work alongside the latest AI and GenAI tools that are increasingly woven into how teams operate: from AI-powered capabilities that accelerate decision-making, to Generative AI that helps you focus on work that truly matters. You'll have opportunities and resources to develop AI fluency at your own pace, with continuous learning built into the culture. Key job responsibilities - Formulate and solve modeling problems for LLM-powered agent systems (MCP servers, text-to-SQL, RAG), designing validation methods and confidence scoring for reliable outputs under operational constraints. - Design evaluation frameworks for AI agents: define metrics for reasoning quality and task completion, build backtesting pipelines, and develop automated regression detection. - Research and implement graph neural network architectures to learn structural representations of logistics networks; develop training methodology and evaluation protocols for production deployment. - Develop GPU-optimized pipelines for model training and inference, with rigorous benchmarking of latency, throughput, and cost trade-offs. - Own the scientific lifecycle end-to-end: problem formulation, experimental design, deployment, and continuous measurement against real operational outcomes. - Collaborate with data engineers and operations stakeholders to validate model outputs and quantify business impact. A day in the life - Diagnose a confidence-score drift in the agent eval dashboard, trace the root cause to a schema change, and redesign the validation logic to be schema-invariant. - Experiment with a graph attention architecture on the logistics network; benchmark against the baseline embedding on a downstream prediction task. - Profile a GPU training job to unblock a scaling experiment, identify a memory bottleneck, and restructure the data loader to halve iteration time. - Present model accuracy trends to operations leaders and recommend threshold adjustments based on the data.
Applied Scientist, AWS Automated Reasoning
US, TX, Austin
Applied Scientists in AWS Automated Reasoning are dedicated to making AWS the best computing service in the world for customers who require advanced and rigorous solutions for automated reasoning, privacy, and sovereignty. Key job responsibilities The successful candidate will: - Solve large or significantly complex problems that require deep knowledge and understanding of your domain and scientific innovation. - Own strategic problem solving, and take the lead on the design, implementation, and delivery for solutions that have a long-term quantifiable impact. - Provide cross-organizational technical influence, increasing productivity and effectiveness by sharing your deep knowledge and experience. - Develop strategic plans to identify fundamentally new solutions for business problems. - Assist in the career development of others, actively mentoring individuals and the community on advanced technical issues. A day in the life This is a unique and rare opportunity to get in early on a fast-growing segment of AWS and help shape the technology, product and the business. You will have a chance to utilize your deep technical experience within a fast moving, start-up environment and make a large business and customer impact. About the team Diverse Experiences Amazon Automated Reasoning values diverse experiences. Even if you do not meet all of the 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. Why Amazon Automated Reasoning? At Amazon, automated reasoning is central to maintaining customer trust and delivering delightful customer experiences. Our organization is responsible for creating and maintaining a high bar for automated reasoning across all of Amazon's products and services. We offer talented automated reasoning professionals the chance to accelerate their careers with opportunities to build experience in a wide variety of areas including cloud, devices, retail, entertainment, healthcare, operations, and physical stores. Inclusive Team Culture In Amazon Automated Reasoning, it's in our nature to learn and be curious. Ongoing DEI events and learning experiences inspire us to continue learning and to embrace our uniqueness. Addressing the toughest automated reasoning challenges requires that we seek out and celebrate a diversity of ideas, perspectives, and voices. Training & 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, training, 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 flexible work hours and arrangements are part of our culture. When we feel supported in the workplace and at home, there's nothing we can't achieve.
Sr. Applied Scientist, AWS Automated Reasoning
US, WA, Seattle
Applied Scientists in AWS Automated Reasoning are dedicated to making AWS the best computing service in the world for customers who require advanced and rigorous solutions for automated reasoning, privacy, and sovereignty. Key job responsibilities The successful candidate will: - Solve large or significantly complex problems that require deep knowledge and understanding of your domain and scientific innovation. - Own strategic problem solving, and take the lead on the design, implementation, and delivery for solutions that have a long-term quantifiable impact. - Provide cross-organizational technical influence, increasing productivity and effectiveness by sharing your deep knowledge and experience. - Develop strategic plans to identify fundamentally new solutions for business problems. - Assist in the career development of others, actively mentoring individuals and the community on advanced technical issues. A day in the life This is a unique and rare opportunity to get in early on a fast-growing segment of AWS and help shape the technology, product and the business. You will have a chance to utilize your deep technical experience within a fast moving, start-up environment and make a large business and customer impact. About the team Diverse Experiences Amazon Automated Reasoning values diverse experiences. Even if you do not meet all of the 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. Why Amazon Automated Reasoning? At Amazon, automated reasoning is central to maintaining customer trust and delivering delightful customer experiences. Our organization is responsible for creating and maintaining a high bar for automated reasoning across all of Amazon's products and services. We offer talented automated reasoning professionals the chance to accelerate their careers with opportunities to build experience in a wide variety of areas including cloud, devices, retail, entertainment, healthcare, operations, and physical stores. Inclusive Team Culture In Amazon Automated Reasoning, it's in our nature to learn and be curious. Ongoing DEI events and learning experiences inspire us to continue learning and to embrace our uniqueness. Addressing the toughest automated reasoning challenges requires that we seek out and celebrate a diversity of ideas, perspectives, and voices. Training & 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, training, 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 flexible work hours and arrangements are part of our culture. When we feel supported in the workplace and at home, there's nothing we can't achieve.
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