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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