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2025-2026 USC-Amazon Center Call for Proposals
USC-Amazon center issues the fifth call for proposals for USC faculty
Topics of interest would include but are not limited to, those below. Please feel free to bring your/your institution’s unique viewpoint and expertise to these topics:
Foundation Model Improvements
Novel model architectures
Novel training algorithms and methodologies
Multi-modal (e.g., text, image, video, audio) understanding and generation
Multi-lingual understanding and generation
Algorithms and workflows for acquiring and curating high-quality and diverse datasets for training
Foundation Model Evaluation
Creation of new benchmarks for assessing foundation model capabilities
Methodologies for robust evaluation of generative AI systems, including agents
Efficient Generative AI
Efficient training and inference for cloud and on-device applications
Compute and memory efficient handling of multi-modal long/infinite context
Improving efficiency of diffusion models, including discrete diffusion
Reasoning
Commonsense and domain-specific (e.g., math, coding) reasoning
Temporal and spatial reasoning
Reasoning for planning
Knowledge Grounding
Approaches to ground (multi-modal) generation on up-to-date world, domain-specific, enterprise, or personal knowledge
Memory-augmented generative AI systems
Agentic AI
Creation of autonomous systems capable of performing tasks, making decisions, and interacting with their environments
Multi-Agent systems and agent orchestration framework improvements
Customization and continual improvement of agents post deployment
Internationalizing agentic systems
Responsible Generative AI
Red teaming (e.g., advanced red teaming approaches, automated red teaming for multi-modal models)
Improvement of foundation model RAI performance (e.g., robustness to jailbreaking and membership inference attacks; watermarking approaches; deepfake detection)
Responsible agentic AI (e.g., robustness of multi-agent systems, adherence to guardrails)
Applications of Generative AI
Systems that leverage Generative AI for advancing science and technology in areas such as physics, mathematics, chemistry, biology, hardware design, materials science, engineering, economics, healthcare, climate.
Timeline
Release of CFP: 30 January 2025
One Page Abstracts Due: 27 February 2025
Full Proposals Due: 03 April 2025 at 5pm PT
Announcements of Selected Projects: July 2025
New Projects Start Date: August 2025
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