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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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Sr. Applied Scientist, Special Projects
US, NY, New York
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. Key job responsibilities - Lead and execute complex, ambiguous research projects from ideation to production deployment - Drive technical strategy and roadmap decisions for ML/AI initiatives - Collaborate cross-functionally with product, engineering, and business teams to translate research into scalable products - Publish research findings at top-tier conferences and contribute to the broader scientific community - Establish best practices for ML experimentation, evaluation, and deployment
Senior Applied Scientist, Measurement, Ad Tech, and Data Science (MADS)
CA, ON, Toronto
The Measurement, Ad Tech, and Data Science (MADS) team at Amazon Ads is at the forefront of developing innovative solutions that help tens of millions of advertisers understand the value of their ad spend while prioritizing customer privacy and measurement quality. The Media Planning Science team, part of broader MADS team, develops and implements models that deliver insights and recommendations for strategic media planning and measurement across Amazon Advertising's product portfolio. Our mission is to help advertisers create and execute plans that meet their objectives while providing accurate measurement tools. We work on a multitude of problem statements that encompass Reach and Frequency, Budget Planning Optimization, and Recommendations. Our models leverage both heuristic and machine learning approaches including deep learning techniques, with insights delivered through agent-based tools and APIs that integrate seamlessly into user interfaces and programmatic systems to ensure optimal advertising outcomes. As a Senior Applied Scientist on the team, you will be at the forefront of innovation, developing media planning solutions end-to-end from inception to production. You will set the technical vision and innovate on behalf of our customers. You will propose, design, analyze, and productionize models to provide novel measurement insights to our customers. You will partner with engineering to deploy these solutions into production. You will work with key stakeholders from various business teams to enable advertisers to act upon those metrics. Key job responsibilities * Lead the development of media planning models and solutions that address the full spectrum of an advertiser's investment, focusing on scalable and efficient methodologies. * Collaborate closely with cross-functional teams including engineering, product management, and business teams to define and implement measurement solutions. * Use state-of-the-art scientific technologies including Generative AI, Classical Machine Learning, Causal Inference, Natural Language Processing, and Computer Vision to develop state of the art models that measure the impact of media plans across different metrics. * Drive experimentation and the continuous improvement of ML models through iterative development, testing, and optimization. * Translate complex scientific challenges into clear and impactful solutions for business stakeholders. * Mentor and guide junior scientists, fostering a collaborative and high-performing team culture. * Foster collaborations between scientists to move faster, with broader impact. * Regularly engage with the broader scientific community with presentations, publications, and patents. A day in the life You will solve real-world problems by analyzing large amounts of data, generate business insights and opportunities, design simulations and experiments, and develop ML/DL models. The team is driven by business needs, which requires collaboration with other Scientists, Engineers, and Product Managers across the advertising organization. You will prepare written and verbal documents to share insights to audiences of varying levels of technical sophistication. About the team We are a team of scientists across Applied, Research, and Data Science disciplines. You will work with colleagues with deep expertise in ML, DL, NLP, 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.
Applied Science Manager, AWS Generative AI Innovation Center
DE, BE, Berlin
Amazon launched the Generative AI Innovation Center (GenAIIC) in June 2023 to help AWS customers accelerate the use of Generative AI to solve business and operational problems and promote innovation in their organization (https://press.aboutamazon.com/2023/6/aws-announces- generative-ai-innovation-center). GenAIIC provides opportunities to innovate in a fast-paced organization that contributes to game-changing projects and technologies that get deployed on devices and in the cloud. As an Applied Science Manager in GenAIIC, you'll partner with technology and business teams to build new generative AI solutions that delight our customers. You will be responsible for directing a team of data/research/applied scientists, deep learning architects, and ML engineers to build generative AI models and pipelines, and deliver state-of-the-art solutions to customer’s business and mission problems. The successful candidate will possess both technical and customer-facing skills that will allow you to be the technical “face” of AWS within our solution providers’ ecosystem/environment as well as directly to end customers. The candidate must ne be able to drive discussions with senior technical and management personnel within customers and partners while hacing technical background that enables them to interact with and give guidance to AI scientists/engineers and software developers. The ideal candidate will also have a demonstrated ability to think strategically about business, product, and technical issues. Of critical importance, the candidate will be an excellent technical team manager, someone who knows how to hire, develop, and retain high quality technical talent. Key job responsibilities You will work directly with customers to drive adoption and shape the future of the most exciting emerging technology by understanding the business problem and guiding our customers in implementation of generative AI solutions, and developing long-term strategic relationships with key accounts You will help develop the industry’s best generative AI delivery team by enabling and coaching your specialist team on best practices and how to create and present value-driven architectures of widely varying size and complexity. You will grow an existing team by hiring, on-boarding, training, and developing new Scientists, Architects, and Engineers from internal and external sources. You will identify opportunities for building reusable technical assets/solutions/products based on recurring patterns of customer needs You will provide customer and market feedback to Product and Engineering teams to help define product direction You will drive revenue growth across a broad set of customers You will be a thought leader and drive value creation for our customers, shaping technical solutions, growing the team, and leading specific customer engagements You will deliver briefing and deep dive sessions to customers and guide customers on adoption patterns and paths to production About the team The GenAI Innovation Center helps customers define and execute AI Strategy, scope and develop use cases that will create the greatest value for their businesses, select/develop/customise/fine-tune the right models, define paths to navigate technical or business challenges, and make plans for launching solutions at scale, responsibly and cost efficiently
Applied Scientist , Amazon Customer Service
US, CA, Santa Clara
We are seeking an Applied Scientist II to join Amazon Customer Service's Science team, where you will build AI-based automated customer service solutions using state-of-the-art techniques in retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), agentic AI, and post-training of large language models. You will work at the intersection of research and production, developing intelligent systems that directly impact millions of customers while collaborating with scientists, engineers, and product managers in a fast-paced, innovative environment. Key job responsibilities - Design, develop, and deploy information retrieval systems and RAG pipelines using embedding models, reranking algorithms, and generative models to improve customer service automation - Conduct post-training of large language models using techniques such as Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT), Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), and Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) to optimize model performance for customer service tasks - Build and curate high-quality datasets for model training and evaluation, ensuring data quality and relevance for customer service applications - Design and implement comprehensive evaluation frameworks, including data curation, metrics development, and methods such as LLM-as-a-judge to assess model performance - Develop AI agents for automated customer service, understanding their advantages and common pitfalls, and implementing solutions that balance automation with customer satisfaction - Independently perform research and development with minimal guidance, staying current with the latest advances in machine learning and AI - Collaborate with cross-functional teams including engineering, product management, and operations to translate research into production systems - Publish findings and contribute to the broader scientific community through papers, patents, and open-source contributions - Monitor and improve deployed models based on real-world performance metrics and customer feedback A day in the life As an Applied Scientist II, you will start your day reviewing metrics from deployed models and identifying opportunities for improvement. You might spend your morning experimenting with new post-training techniques to improve model accuracy, then collaborate with engineers to integrate your latest model into production systems. You will participate in design reviews, share your findings with the team, and mentor junior scientists. You will balance research exploration with practical implementation, always keeping the customer experience at the forefront of your work. You will have the autonomy to drive your own research agenda while contributing to team goals and deliverables. About the team The Amazon Customer Service Science team is dedicated to revolutionizing customer support through advanced AI and machine learning. We are a diverse group of scientists and engineers working on some of the most challenging problems in natural language understanding and AI automation. Our team values innovation, collaboration, and a customer-obsessed mindset. We encourage experimentation, celebrate learning from failures, and are committed to maintaining Amazon's high bar for scientific rigor and operational excellence. You will have access to world-class computing resources, massive datasets, and the opportunity to work alongside some of the brightest minds in AI and machine learning.
Applied Scientist, AGI , AGI Information
US, CA, Sunnyvale
Amazon's AGI Information is seeking an exceptional Applied Scientist to drive science advancements in the Amazon Knowledge Graph team (AKG). AKG is re-inventing knowledge graphs for the LLM era, optimizing for LLM grounding. At the same time, AKG is innovating to utilize LLMs in the knowledge graph construction pipelines to overcome obstacles that traditional technologies could not overcome. As a member of the AKG IR team, you will have the opportunity to work on interesting problems with immediate customer impact. The team is addressing challenges in web-scale knowledge mining, fact verification, multilingual information retrieval, and agent memory operating over Graphs. You will also have the opportunity to work with scientists working on the other challenges, and with the engineering teams that deliver the science advancements to our customers. A successful candidate has a strong machine learning and agent background, is a master of state-of-the-art techniques, has a strong publication record, has a desire to push the envelope in one or more of the above areas, and has a track record of delivering to customers. The ideal candidate enjoys operating in dynamic environments, is self-motivated to take on new challenges, and enjoys working with customers, stakeholders, and engineering teams to deliver big customer impact, shipping solutions via rapid experimentation and then iterating on user feedback and interactions. Key job responsibilities As an Applied Scientist, you will leverage your technical expertise and experience to demonstrate leadership in tackling large complex problems. You will collaborate with applied scientists and engineers to develop novel algorithms and modeling techniques to build the knowledge graph that delivers fresh factual knowledge to our customers, and that automates the knowledge graph construction pipelines to scale to many billions of facts. Your first responsibility will be to solve entity resolution to enable conflating facts from multiple sources into a single graph entity for each real world entity. You will develop generic solutions that work fo all classes of data in AKG (e.g., people, places, movies, etc.), that cope with sparse, noisy data, that scale to hundreds of millions of entities, and that can handle streaming data. You will define a roadmap to make progress incrementally and you will insist on scientific rigor, leading by example.
Applied Scientist II, Reinforcement Learning
US, MA, N.reading
Amazon is seeking exceptional talent to help develop the next generation of advanced robotics systems that will transform automation at Amazon's scale. We're building revolutionary robotic systems that combine cutting-edge AI, sophisticated control systems, and advanced mechanical design to create adaptable automation solutions capable of working safely alongside humans in dynamic environments. This is a unique opportunity to shape the future of robotics and automation at an unprecedented scale, working with world-class teams pushing the boundaries of what's possible in robotic dexterous manipulation, locomotion, and human-robot interaction. This role presents an opportunity to shape the future of robotics through innovative applications of deep learning and large language models. At Amazon we leverage advanced robotics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence to solve complex operational challenges at an unprecedented scale. Our fleet of robots operates across hundreds of facilities worldwide, working in sophisticated coordination to fulfill our mission of customer excellence. The ideal candidate will contribute to research that bridges the gap between theoretical advancement and practical implementation in robotics. You will be part of a team that's revolutionizing how robots learn, adapt, and interact with their environment. Join us in building the next generation of intelligent robotics systems that will transform the future of automation and human-robot collaboration. Key job responsibilities - Design and implement whole body control methods for balance, locomotion, and dexterous manipulation - Utilize state-of-the-art in methods in learned and model-based control - Create robust and safe behaviors for different terrains and tasks - Implement real-time controllers with stability guarantees - Collaborate effectively with multi-disciplinary teams to co-design hardware and algorithms for loco-manipulation - Mentor junior engineer and scientists
Senior Applied Scientist
US, CA, Sunnyvale
Amazon is seeking exceptional talent to help develop the next generation of advanced robotics systems that will transform automation at Amazon's scale. We're building revolutionary robotic systems that combine innovative AI, sophisticated control systems, and advanced mechanical design to create adaptable automation solutions capable of working safely alongside humans in dynamic environments. This is a unique opportunity to shape the future of robotics and automation at unprecedented scale, working with world-class teams pushing the boundaries of what's possible in robotic manipulation, locomotion, and human-robot interaction. This role presents an opportunity to shape the future of robotics through innovative applications of deep learning and large language models. We leverage advanced robotics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence to solve complex operational challenges at unprecedented scale. Our fleet of robots operates across hundreds of facilities worldwide, working in sophisticated coordination to fulfill our mission of customer excellence. We are pioneering the development of robotics foundation models that: - Enable unprecedented generalization across diverse tasks - Integrate multi-modal learning capabilities (visual, tactile, linguistic) - Accelerate skill acquisition through demonstration learning - Enhance robotic perception and environmental understanding - Streamline development processes through reusable capabilities The ideal candidate will contribute to research that bridges the gap between theoretical advancement and practical implementation in robotics. You will be part of a team that's revolutionizing how robots learn, adapt, and interact with their environment. Join us in building the next generation of intelligent robotics systems that will transform the future of automation and human-robot collaboration. As a Senior Applied Scientist, you will develop and improve machine learning systems that help robots perceive, reason, and act in real-world environments. You will leverage state-of-the-art models (open source and internal research), evaluate them on representative tasks, and adapt/optimize them to meet robustness, safety, and performance needs. You will invent new algorithms where gaps exist. You’ll collaborate closely with research, controls, hardware, and product-facing teams, and your outputs will be used by downstream teams to further customize and deploy on specific robot embodiments. Key job responsibilities As a Senior Applied Scientist in the Foundations Model team, you will: - Leverage state-of-the-art models for targeted tasks, environments, and robot embodiments through fine-tuning and optimization. - Execute rapid, rigorous experimentation with reproducible results and solid engineering practices, closing the gap between sim and real environments. - Build and run capability evaluations/benchmarks to clearly profile performance, generalization, and failure modes. - Contribute to the data and training workflow: collection/curation, dataset quality/provenance, and repeatable training recipes. - Write clean, maintainable, well commented and documented code, contribute to training infrastructure, create tools for model evaluation and testing, and implement necessary APIs - Stay current with latest developments in foundation models and robotics, assist in literature reviews and research documentation, prepare technical reports and presentations, and contribute to research discussions and brainstorming sessions. - Work closely with senior scientists, engineers, and leaders across multiple teams, participate in knowledge sharing, support integration efforts with robotics hardware teams, and help document best practices and methodologies.
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