ConversationalAI.svg
Research Area

Conversational AI

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

Publications

View all View all
  • Weijie Xu, Jay Desai, Srinivasan Sengamedu, "SHS", Xiaoyu Jiang, Francis Iannacci
    ICLR 2023 Workshop on Practical Machine Learning for Developing Countries (PML4DC)
    2023
    Language model based methods are powerful techniques for text classification. However, the models have several shortcomings. (1) It is difficult to integrate human knowledge such as keywords. (2) It needs a lot of resources to train the models. (3) It relied on large text data to pretrain. In this paper, we propose Semi-Supervised vMF Neural Topic Modeling (S2vNTM) to overcome these difficulties. S2vNTM
  • Priyanka Sen, Sandeep Mavadia, Amir Saffari
    ACL 2023 Workshop on Natural Language Reasoning and Structured Explanations
    2023
    Large language models have shown impressive abilities to reason over input text, however, they are prone to hallucinations. On the other hand, end-to-end knowledge graph question answering (KGQA) models output responses grounded in facts, but they still struggle with complex reasoning, such as comparison or ordinal questions. In this paper, we propose a new method for complex question answering where we
  • Anshu Bhatia, Sanchit Sinha, Saket Dingliwal, Karthik Gopalakrishnan, Sravan Bodapati, Katrin Kirchhoff
    Interspeech 2023
    2023
    Speech representations learned in a self-supervised fashion from massive unlabeled speech corpora have been adapted successfully toward several downstream tasks. However, such representations may be skewed toward canonical data characteristics of such corpora and perform poorly on atypical, nonnative accented speaker populations. With the state-of-the-art HuBERT model as a baseline, we propose and investigate
  • Weijie Xu, Billy Jiang, Jay Desai, Bin Han, Fuqin Yan, Francis Iannacci
    ICLR 2022 Workshop on Practical Machine Learning for Developing Countries
    2023
    In text classification tasks, fine tuning pretrained language models like BERT and GPT-3 yields competitive accuracy; however, both methods require pretraining on large text datasets. In contrast, general topic modeling methods possess the advantage of analyzing documents to extract meaningful patterns of words without the need of pretraining. To leverage topic modeling’s unsupervised insights extraction
  • Weijie Xu, Xiaoyu Jiang, Srinivasan Sengamedu, "SHS", Francis Iannacci, Jinjin Zhao
    ACL Findings 2023
    2023
    Recently, Neural Topic Models (NTM), inspired by variational autoencoders, have attracted a lot of research interest; however, these methods have limited applications in the real world due to the challenge of incorporating human knowledge. This work presents a semi-supervised neural topic modeling method, vONTSS, which uses von Mises-Fisher (vMF) based variational autoencoders and optimal transport. When

Related content

IN, KA, Bengaluru
Are you passionate about solving complex business problems at scale through Generative AI? Do you want to help build intelligent systems that reason, act, and learn from minimal supervision? If so, we have an exciting opportunity for you on Amazon's Trustworthy Shopping Experience (TSE) team. At TSE, our vision is to guarantee customers a worry-free shopping experience by earning their trust that the products they buy are safe, authentic, and compliant with regulations and policy. We do this in close partnership with our selling partners, empowering them with best-in-class tools and expertise to offer a high-quality, compliant selection that customers trust. As an Applied Scientist I, you will bring subject matter expertise in at least one relevant discipline (e.g., NLP, computer vision, representation learning, agentic architecture) to contribute to next-generation agentic AI solutions that automate complex manual investigation processes at Amazon scale. Working alongside senior scientists, you will map business goals—such as reducing cost-of-serving while maintaining trust and safety standards—to well-defined scientific problems and metrics. You will invent, refine, and experiment with solutions spanning agentic reasoning, self-supervised representation learning, few-shot adaptation, multimodal understanding, and model compression. With guidance from senior scientists, you will stay current on research trends and benchmark your results against the state of the art. You will help design and execute experiments to identify optimal solutions, initiating the development and implementation of small components with team guidance. You will write secure, stable, testable, and well-documented production code at the level of an SDE I, rigorously evaluating models and quantifying performance. You will handle data in accordance with Amazon policies, troubleshoot issues to root cause, and ensure your work does not put the company at risk. Your scope of influence will typically be at the self-level, with the possibility of mentoring interns. You will participate in team design and prioritization discussions, learn the business context behind TSE's products, and escalate problems with proposed solutions. You will publish internal technical reports and may contribute to peer-reviewed publications and external review activities when aligned with business needs. This role offers a unique opportunity to contribute to end-to-end AI development—from research through production—with your contributions serving hundreds of millions of customers within months, not years. Key job responsibilities • Contribute to the design and development of agentic AI systems with multi-step reasoning, autonomous task execution, and multimodal intelligence, including feedback and memory mechanisms, leveraging reinforcement learning techniques for agent decision-making and policy optimization, with input and guidance from senior scientists • Help productionize models built on top of SFT (Supervised Fine-tuning) and RFT (Reinforced Fine-tuning) approaches, as well as few-shot approaches based on multimodal datasets spanning text, images, and structured data, applying mathematical optimization techniques to improve efficiency, resource allocation, and decision-making in complex workflows, working alongside senior scientists to identify optimal solutions • Contribute to building production-ready deep learning and conventional ML solutions, including multimodal fusion and cross-modal alignment techniques that seamlessly connect visual, textual, and relational understanding, to support automation requirements within your team's scope • Help identify customer and business problems; use reasonable assumptions, data, and customer requirements to solve well-defined scientific problems involving multimodal inputs such as unstructured text, documents, product images, and relational data, developing representations that capture complementary signals across modalities and mapping business goals to scientific metrics • May co-author research papers for peer-reviewed internal and/or external venues, including contributions in areas such as multimodal representation learning and vision-language modeling, and contribute to the wider scientific community by reviewing research submissions, when aligned with business needs • Prototype rapidly, iterate based on feedback, and deliver small components at SDE I level—including multimodal data pipelines and inference modules—that integrate into production-scale systems • Write secure, stable, testable, maintainable, and well-documented code, balancing model capability, deployment cost, and resource usage across multimodal architectures while understanding state-of-the-art data structures, algorithms, and performance tradeoffs • Rigorously test code and evaluate models across individual and combined modalities, quantifying their performance; troubleshoot issues, research root causes, and thoroughly resolve defects, leaving systems more maintainable • Participate in team design, scoping, and prioritization discussions through clear verbal and written communication; seek to learn the business context, science, and engineering behind your team's products, including how multimodal signals contribute to trust and safety decisions • Participate in engineering best practices with peer reviews; clearly document approaches and communicate design decisions; publish internal technical reports to institutionalize scientific learning • Help train and mentor scientist interns; identify and escalate problems with proposed solutions, taking ownership or ensuring clear hand-off to the right owner About the team Trustworthy Shopping Experience Product team in TSE is responsible for the human-in-the-loop products and technology used in the risk investigations at Amazon. The team is also responsible for reducing the cost of performing the investigations, by automating wherever possible and optimizing the experience where manual interventions are needed. The team leverages state-of-the art technology and GenAI to deliver the products and associated goals.
US, NY, New York
Do you want to lead the Ads industry and redefine how we measure the effectiveness of Amazon Ads business? Are you passionate about causal inference, Deep Learning & AI, raising the science bar, and connecting leading-edge science research to Amazon-scale implementation? If so, come join Amazon Ads to be a science leader within our Advertising Incrementality Measurement science team! Our work builds the foundations for providing customer-facing advertising measurement tools, furthering internal research & development, and building out Amazon's advertising measurement offerings. Incrementality is a lynchpin for the next generation of Amazon Advertising measurement solutions, and this role will play a key role in the release and expansion of these offerings. We are looking for a thought leader that has an aptitude for delivering customer-focused solutions and who enjoys working on the intersection of Big-Data analytics, Machine/Deep Learning, and Causal Inference. A successful candidate will be a self-starter, comfortable with ambiguity, able to think big and be creative, while still paying careful attention to detail. You should be able to translate how data represents the customer journey, be comfortable dealing with large and complex data sets, and have experience using machine learning and/or econometric modeling to solve business problems. You should have strong analytical and communication skills, be able to work with product managers to define key business questions and work with the engineering team to bring our solutions into production. You will join a highly collaborative and diverse working environment that will empower you to shape the future of Amazon advertising, and also allow you to become part of our large science community. Key job responsibilities • Apply expertise in ML/DL, AI, and causal modeling to develop new models that describe how advertising impacts customers’ actions • Own the end-to-end development of novel scientific models that address the most pressing needs of our business stakeholders and help guide their future actions • Improve upon and simplify our existing solutions and frameworks • Review and audit modeling processes and results for other scientists, both junior and senior • Work with leadership to align our scientific developments with the business strategy • Identify new opportunities that are suggested by the data insights • Bring a department-wide perspective into decision making • Develop and document scientific research to be shared with the greater science community at Amazon About the team AIM is a cross disciplinary team of engineers, product managers, economists, data scientists, and applied scientists with a charter to build scientifically-rigorous causal inference methodologies at scale. Our job is to help customers cut through the noise of the modern advertising landscape and understand what actions, behaviors, and strategies actually have a real, measurable impact on key outcomes. The data we produce becomes the effective ground truth for advertisers and partners making decisions affecting millions in advertising spend.
US, MA, Boston
We're a new research lab based in San Francisco and Boston focused on developing foundational capabilities for useful AI agents. We're pursuing several key research bets that will enable AI agents to perform real-world actions, learn from human feedback, self-course-correct, and infer human goals. We're particularly excited about combining large language models (LLMs) with reinforcement learning (RL) to solve reasoning and planning, learned world models, and generalizing agents to physical environments. We're a small, talent-dense team with the resources and scale of Amazon. Each team has the autonomy to move fast and the long-term commitment to pursue high-risk, high-payoff research. AI agents are the next frontier—the right research bets can reinvent what's possible. Join us and help build this lab from the ground up. Key job responsibilities * Define the product vision and roadmap for our agentic developer platform, translating research into products developers love * Partner deeply with research and engineering to identify which capabilities are ready for productization and shape how they're exposed to customers * Own the developer experience end-to-end from API design and SDK ergonomics to documentation, sample apps, and onboarding flows * Understand our customers deeply by engaging directly with developers and end-users, synthesizing feedback, and using data to drive prioritization * Shape how the world builds AI agents by defining new primitives, patterns, and best practices for agentic applications About the team Our team brings the AGI Lab's agent capabilities to customers. We build accessible, usable products: interfaces, frameworks, and solutions, that turn our platform and model capabilities into AI agents developers can use. We own the Nova Act agent playground, Nova Act IDE extension, Nova Act SDK, Nova Act AWS Console, reference architectures, sample applications, and more.
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.
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.
US, NY, New York
Do you want to lead the Ads industry and redefine how we measure the effectiveness of Amazon Ads business? Are you passionate about causal inference, Deep Learning & AI, raising the science bar, and connecting leading-edge science research to Amazon-scale implementation? If so, come join Amazon Ads to be a science leader within our Advertising Incrementality Measurement science team! Our work builds the foundations for providing customer-facing advertising measurement tools, furthering internal research & development, and building out Amazon's advertising measurement offerings. Incrementality is a lynchpin for the next generation of Amazon Advertising measurement solutions, and this role will play a key role in the release and expansion of these offerings. We are looking for a thought leader that has an aptitude for delivering customer-focused solutions and who enjoys working on the intersection of Big-Data analytics, Machine/Deep Learning, and Causal Inference. A successful candidate will be a self-starter, comfortable with ambiguity, able to think big and be creative, while still paying careful attention to detail. You should be able to translate how data represents the customer journey, be comfortable dealing with large and complex data sets, and have experience using machine learning and/or econometric modeling to solve business problems. You should have strong analytical and communication skills, be able to work with product managers to define key business questions and work with the engineering team to bring our solutions into production. You will join a highly collaborative and diverse working environment that will empower you to shape the future of Amazon advertising, and also allow you to become part of our large science community. Key job responsibilities • Apply expertise in ML/DL, AI, and causal modeling to develop new models that describe how advertising impacts customers’ actions • Own the end-to-end development of novel scientific models that address the most pressing needs of our business stakeholders and help guide their future actions • Improve upon and simplify our existing solutions and frameworks • Review and audit modeling processes and results for other scientists, both junior and senior • Work with leadership to align our scientific developments with the business strategy • Identify new opportunities that are suggested by the data insights • Bring a department-wide perspective into decision making • Develop and document scientific research to be shared with the greater science community at Amazon About the team AIM is a cross disciplinary team of engineers, product managers, economists, data scientists, and applied scientists with a charter to build scientifically-rigorous causal inference methodologies at scale. Our job is to help customers cut through the noise of the modern advertising landscape and understand what actions, behaviors, and strategies actually have a real, measurable impact on key outcomes. The data we produce becomes the effective ground truth for advertisers and partners making decisions affecting millions in advertising spend.
CA, BC, Vancouver
The Alexa Daily Essentials team delivers experiences critical to how customers interact with Alexa as part of daily life. Alexa users engage with our products across experiences connected to Timers, Alarms, Calendars, Food, and News. Our experiences include critical time saving techniques, ad-supported news audio and video, and in-depth kitchen guidance aimed at serving the needs of the family from sunset to sundown. As a Data Scientist on our team, you'll work with complex data, develop statistical methodologies, and provide critical product insights that shape how we build and optimize our solutions. You will work closely with your Analytics and Applied Science teammates. You will build frameworks and mechanisms to scale data solutions across our organization. If you are passionate about redefining how AI can improves everyone's daily life, we’d love to hear from you. Key job responsibilities Problem-Solving - Analyze complex data to identify patterns, inform product decisions, and understand root causes of anomalies. - Develop analysis and modeling approaches to drive product and engineering actions to identify patterns, insights, and understand root causes of anomalies. Your solutions directly improve the customer experience. - Independently work with product partners to identify problems and opportunities. Apply a range of data science techniques and tools to solve these problems. Use data driven insights to inform product development. Work with cross-disciplinary teams to mechanize your solution into scalable and automated frameworks. Data Infrastructure - Build data pipelines, and identify novel data sources to leverage in analytical work - both from within Alexa and from cross Amazon - Acquire data by building the necessary SQL / ETL queries Communication - Excel at communicating complex ideas to technical and non-technical audiences. - Build relationships with stakeholders and counterparts. Work with stakeholders to translate causal insights into actionable recommendations - Force multiply the work of the team with data visualizations, presentations, and/or dashboards to drive awareness and adoption of data assets and product insights - Collaborate with cross-functional teams. Mentor teammates to foster a culture of continuous learning and development
US, CA, San Francisco
In this role, you will act as the primary specialist for physics engine internals and dynamics, developing high-fidelity, vectorized simulation environments for robotics locomotion, navigation, and interaction/manipulation. You will collaborate with hardware engineers to validate robot models and partner with research scientists to ensure numerical stability and physical accuracy for Sim2Real transfer. Your work focuses on tuning solvers, optimizing collision dynamics, and performing system identification to enable the training of robust robot control policies for complex, physical interactions. Key job responsibilities * Develop and maintain the shared simulation software framework, specifically owning the physics integration, robot state management, and control layers * Develop and optimize parallelized (vectorized) physics environments for high-throughput reinforcement learning (e.g., Isaac Lab, MuJoCo) * Tune physics engine parameters (solvers, friction, restitution) to support complex contact-rich scenarios required for dexterous manipulation and agile locomotion. * Implement and validate complex robot models (URDF/MJCF) involving precise actuator and sensor modeling * Collaborate with robot engineers and scientists to perform System Identification (SysID) to minimize the Sim2Real gap About the team At Frontier AI & Robotics (FAR), we're not just advancing robotics – we're reimagining it from the ground up. Our team is building the future of intelligent robotics through frontier foundation models and end-to-end learned systems. We tackle some of the most challenging problems in AI and robotics, from developing sophisticated perception systems to creating adaptive manipulation strategies that work in complex, real-world scenarios. What sets us apart is our unique combination of ambitious research vision and practical impact. We leverage Amazon's massive computational infrastructure and rich real-world datasets to train and deploy state-of-the-art foundation models. Our work spans the full spectrum of robotics intelligence – from multimodal perception using images, videos, and sensor data, to sophisticated manipulation strategies that can handle diverse real-world scenarios. We're building systems that don't just work in the lab, but scale to meet the demands of Amazon's global operations. Join us if you're excited about pushing the boundaries of what's possible in robotics, working with world-class researchers, and seeing your innovations deployed at unprecedented scale.
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 a Senior Applied Scientist on the team, you will be at the forefront of innovation, developing measurement 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 ad measurement 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 ad spend across multiple platforms and timescales. * 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 getting and analyzing large amounts of data, generate business insights and opportunities, design simulations and experiments, and develop statistical and ML 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 presentations to share insights to audiences of varying levels of technical sophistication. Team video https://advertising.amazon.com/help/G4LNN5YWHP6SM9TJ 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.
CA, ON, Toronto
The Brand Registry team is seeking an Applied Scientist to tackle complex, high-impact problems that directly affect millions of brands, selling partners, and customers on Amazon. You will design, develop, and deploy AI solutions—leveraging large language models (LLMs) and agentic AI frameworks—to power intelligent automation that augments human decision-making and drives autonomous outcomes at scale. What You'll Do -Build agent-based AI systems that reason, plan, and act like domain experts progressing from decision-support tools to fully autonomous solutions -Own the end-to-end ML lifecycle, from problem formulation and data analysis through experimentation, model development, and production deployment -Work backwards from data insights and customer feedback to identify the highest-value science opportunities and translate them into scalable machine learning solutions -Partner closely with product managers and engineering teams to define requirements, iterate rapidly, and launch solutions that deliver measurable business impact -Collaborate with domain experts across Amazon to pioneer innovative approaches to unsolved problems in brand protection and seller experience What We're Looking For -Technical depth: Extensive hands-on experience in Machine Learning, with a strong focus on Generative AI and LLM-based applications (e.g., fine-tuning, prompt engineering, retrieval-augmented generation, multi-agent orchestration) -End-to-end delivery: Proven track record of driving large-scale ML initiatives from conception through production launch in fast-paced, ambiguous environments -Scientific rigor: Strong foundation in experimental design, statistical analysis, and the ability to translate research into production-grade systems -Customer obsession: A bias toward working backwards from real-world problems and customer pain points rather than technology for its own sake -Entrepreneurial mindset: Comfort with ambiguity, a bias for action, and the tenacity to break down complex problems into actionable solutions -Communication skills: Ability to articulate technical concepts clearly to both technical and non-technical stakeholders About the team Brand Registry's mission is bold and unambiguous: protect 100% of the brands in the Amazon catalog. We are the team that stands between authentic brands and the forces that threaten their integrity — counterfeit products, catalog abuse, unauthorized sellers, and inaccurate brand representation. We do this by building the tools, systems, and experiences that empower brand owners to establish, protect, and grow their presence on Amazon with confidence. Achieving this mission requires deep collaboration across science, engineering, legal, and selling partner experience teams — all working in concert to deliver a seamless, trustworthy brand ownership experience at global scale.