Monthly Archives: May 2024

Today, we’re excited to announce the availability of Meta Llama 3 inference on AWS Trainium and AWS Inferentia based instances in Amazon SageMaker JumpStart. The Meta Llama 3 models are a collection of pre-trained and fine-tuned generative text models. Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) Trn1 and Inf2 instances, powered by AWS Trainium and AWS Inferentia2, provide the most cost-effective way to deploy Llama 3 models on AWS. They offer up to 50% lower cost to deploy than comparable Amazon EC2 instances. They not only reduce the time and expense involved in training and deploying large language models (LLMs), but also provide developers with easier access to high-performance accelerators to meet the scalability and efficiency needs of real-time applications, such as chatbots and AI assistants.

In this post, we demonstrate how easy it is to deploy Llama 3 on AWS Trainium and AWS Inferentia based instances in SageMaker JumpStart.

Meta Llama 3 model on SageMaker Studio

SageMaker JumpStart provides access to publicly available and proprietary foundation models (FMs). Foundation models are onboarded and maintained from third-party and proprietary providers. As such, they are released under different licenses as designated by the model source. Be sure to review the license for any FM that you use. You are responsible for reviewing and complying with applicable license terms and making sure they are acceptable for your use case before downloading or using the content.

You can access the Meta Llama 3 FMs through SageMaker JumpStart on the Amazon SageMaker Studio console and the SageMaker Python SDK. In this section, we go over how to discover the models in SageMaker Studio.

SageMaker Studio is an integrated development environment (IDE) that provides a single web-based visual interface where you can access purpose-built tools to perform all machine learning (ML) development steps, from preparing data to building, training, and deploying your ML models. For more details on how to get started and set up SageMaker Studio, refer to Get Started with SageMaker Studio.

On the SageMaker Studio console, you can access SageMaker JumpStart by choosing JumpStart in the navigation pane. If you’re using SageMaker Studio Classic, refer to Open and use JumpStart in Studio Classic to navigate to the SageMaker JumpStart models.

From the SageMaker JumpStart landing page, you can search for “Meta” in the search box.

Choose the Meta model card to list all the models from Meta on SageMaker JumpStart.

You can also find relevant model variants by searching for “neuron.” If you don’t see Meta Llama 3 models, update your SageMaker Studio version by shutting down and restarting SageMaker Studio.

No-code deployment of the Llama 3 Neuron model on SageMaker JumpStart

You can choose the model card to view details about the model, such as the license, data used to train, and how to use it. You can also find two buttons, Deploy and Preview notebooks, which help you deploy the model.

When you choose Deploy, the page shown in the following screenshot appears. The top section of the page shows the end-user license agreement (EULA) and acceptable use policy for you to acknowledge.

After you acknowledge the policies, provide your endpoint settings and choose Deploy to deploy the endpoint of the model.

Alternatively, you can deploy through the example notebook by choosing Open Notebook. The example notebook provides end-to-end guidance on how to deploy the model for inference and clean up resources.

Meta Llama 3 deployment on AWS Trainium and AWS Inferentia using the SageMaker JumpStart SDK

In SageMaker JumpStart, we have pre-compiled the Meta Llama 3 model for a variety of configurations to avoid runtime compilation during deployment and fine-tuning. The Neuron Compiler FAQ has more details about the compilation process.

There are two ways to deploy Meta Llama 3 on AWS Inferentia and Trainium based instances using the SageMaker JumpStart SDK. You can deploy the model with two lines of code for simplicity, or focus on having more control of the deployment configurations. The following code snippet shows the simpler mode of deployment:

from sagemaker.jumpstart.model import JumpStartModel

model_id = "meta-textgenerationneuron-llama-3-8b"
accept_eula = True
model = JumpStartModel(model_id=model_id)
predictor = model.deploy(accept_eula=accept_eula) ## To set 'accept_eula' to be True to deploy 

To perform inference on these models, you need to specify the argument accept_eula as True as part of the model.deploy() call. This means you have read and accepted the EULA of the model. The EULA can be found in the model card description or from https://ai.meta.com/resources/models-and-libraries/llama-downloads/.

The default instance type for Meta LIama-3-8B is is ml.inf2.24xlarge. The other supported model IDs for deployment are the following:

• meta-textgenerationneuron-llama-3-70b
• meta-textgenerationneuron-llama-3-8b-instruct
• meta-textgenerationneuron-llama-3-70b-instruct

SageMaker JumpStart has pre-selected configurations that can help get you started, which are listed in the following table. For more information about optimizing these configurations further, refer to advanced deployment configurations

The following code shows how you can customize deployment configurations such as sequence length, tensor parallel degree, and maximum rolling batch size:

from sagemaker.jumpstart.model import JumpStartModel

model_id = "meta-textgenerationneuron-llama-3-70b"
model = JumpStartModel(
    model_id=model_id,
    env={
        "OPTION_DTYPE": "bf16",
        "OPTION_N_POSITIONS": "8192",
        "OPTION_TENSOR_PARALLEL_DEGREE": "32",
        "OPTION_MAX_ROLLING_BATCH_SIZE": "4", 
    },
    instance_type="ml.trn1.32xlarge"  
)
## To set 'accept_eula' to be True to deploy 
pretrained_predictor = model.deploy(accept_eula=False)

Now that you have deployed the Meta Llama 3 neuron model, you can run inference from it by invoking the endpoint:

payload = {
    "inputs": "I believe the meaning of life is",
    "parameters": {
        "max_new_tokens": 64,
        "top_p": 0.9,
        "temperature": 0.6,
    },
}

response = pretrained_predictor.predict(payload)

Output: 

I believe the meaning of life is
>  to be happy. I believe that happiness is a choice. I believe that happiness 
is a state of mind. I believe that happiness is a state of being. I believe that 
happiness is a state of being. I believe that happiness is a state of being. I 
believe that happiness is a state of being. I believe

For more information on the parameters in the payload, refer to Detailed parameters.

Refer to Fine-tune and deploy Llama 2 models cost-effectively in Amazon SageMaker JumpStart with AWS Inferentia and AWS Trainium for details on how to pass the parameters to control text generation.

Clean up

After you have completed your training job and don’t want to use the existing resources anymore, you can delete the resources using the following code:

# Delete resources
# Delete the fine-tuned model
predictor.delete_model()

# Delete the fine-tuned model endpoint
predictor.delete_endpoint()

Conclusion

The deployment of Meta Llama 3 models on AWS Inferentia and AWS Trainium using SageMaker JumpStart demonstrates the lowest cost for deploying large-scale generative AI models like Llama 3 on AWS. These models, including variants like Meta-Llama-3-8B, Meta-Llama-3-8B-Instruct, Meta-Llama-3-70B, and Meta-Llama-3-70B-Instruct, use AWS Neuron for inference on AWS Trainium and Inferentia. AWS Trainium and Inferentia offer up to 50% lower cost to deploy than comparable EC2 instances.

In this post, we demonstrated how to deploy Meta Llama 3 models on AWS Trainium and AWS Inferentia using SageMaker JumpStart. The ability to deploy these models through the SageMaker JumpStart console and Python SDK offers flexibility and ease of use. We are excited to see how you use these models to build interesting generative AI applications.

To start using SageMaker JumpStart, refer to Getting started with Amazon SageMaker JumpStart. For more examples of deploying models on AWS Trainium and AWS Inferentia, see the GitHub repo. For more information on deploying Meta Llama 3 models on GPU-based instances, see Meta Llama 3 models are now available in Amazon SageMaker JumpStart.

About the Authors

Xin Huang is a Senior Applied Scientist
Rachna Chadha is a Principal Solutions Architect – AI/ML
Qing Lan is a Senior SDE – ML System
Pinak Panigrahi is a Senior Solutions Architect Annapurna ML
Christopher Whitten is a Software Development Engineer
Kamran Khan is a Head of BD/GTM Annapurna ML
Ashish Khetan is a Senior Applied Scientist
Pradeep Cruz is a Senior SDM

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As more powerful large language models (LLMs) are used to perform a variety of tasks with greater accuracy, the number of applications and services that are being built with generative artificial intelligence (AI) is also growing. With great power comes responsibility, and organizations want to make sure that these LLMs produce responses that align with their organizational values and provide the same unique experience they always intended for their end-customers.

Evaluating AI-generated responses presents challenges. This post discusses techniques to align them with company values and build a custom reward model using Amazon SageMaker. By doing so, you can provide customized customer experiences that uniquely reflect your organization’s brand identity and ethos.

Challenges with out-of-the-box LLMs

Out-of-the-box LLMs provide high accuracy, but often lack customization for an organization’s specific needs and end-users. Human feedback varies in subjectivity across organizations and customer segments. Collecting diverse, subjective human feedback to refine LLMs is time-consuming and unscalable.

This post showcases a reward modeling technique to efficiently customize LLMs for an organization by programmatically defining rewards functions that capture preferences for model behavior. We demonstrate an approach to deliver LLM results tailored to an organization without intensive, continual human judgement. The techniques aim to overcome customization and scalability challenges by encoding an organization’s subjective quality standards into a reward model that guides the LLM to generate preferable outputs.

Objective vs. subjective human feedback

Not all human feedback is the same. We can categorize human feedback into two types: objective and subjective.

Any human being who is asked to judge the color of the following boxes would confirm that the left one is a white box and right one is a black box. This is objective, and there are no changes to it whatsoever.

Determining whether an AI model’s output is “great” is inherently subjective. Consider the following color spectrum. If asked to describe the colors on the ends, people would provide varied, subjective responses based on their perceptions. One person’s white may be another’s gray.

This subjectivity poses a challenge for improving AI through human feedback. Unlike objective right/wrong feedback, subjective preferences are nuanced and personalized. The same output could elicit praise from one person and criticism from another. The key is acknowledging and accounting for the fundamental subjectivity of human preferences in AI training. Rather than seeking elusive objective truths, we must provide models exposure to the colorful diversity of human subjective judgment.

Unlike traditional model tasks such as classification, which can be neatly benchmarked on test datasets, assessing the quality of a sprawling conversational agent is highly subjective. One human’s riveting prose is another’s aimless drivel. So how should we refine these expansive language models when humans intrinsically disagree on the hallmarks of a “good” response?

The key is gathering feedback from a diverse crowd. With enough subjective viewpoints, patterns emerge on engaging discourse, logical coherence, and harmless content. Models can then be tuned based on broader human preferences. There is a general perception that reward models are often associated only with Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF). Reward modeling, in fact, goes beyond RLHF, and can be a powerful tool for aligning AI-generated responses with an organization’s specific values and brand identity.

Reward modeling

You can choose an LLM and have it generate numerous responses to diverse prompts, and then your human labelers will rank those responses. It’s important to have diversity in human labelers. Clear labeling guidelines are critical. Without explicit criteria, judgments can become arbitrary. Useful dimensions include coherence, relevance, creativity, factual correctness, logical consistency, and more. Human labelers put these responses into categories and label them favorite to least favorite, as shown in the following example. This example showcases how different humans perceive these possible responses from the LLM in terms of their most favorite (labeled as 1 in this case) and least favorite (labeled as 3 in this case). Each column is labeled 1, 2, or 3 from each human to signify their most preferred and least preferred response from the LLM.

By compiling these subjective ratings, patterns emerge on what resonates across readers. The aggregated human feedback essentially trains a separate reward model on writing qualities that appeal to people. This technique of distilling crowd perspectives into an AI reward function is called reward modeling. It provides a method to improve LLM output quality based on diverse subjective viewpoints.

Solution overview

In this post, we detail how to train a reward model based on organization-specific human labeling feedback collected for various prompts tested on the base FM. The following diagram illustrates the solution architecture.

For more details, see the accompanying notebook.

Prerequisites

To successfully train a reward model, you need the following:

• A large dataset with prompts and ranked responses from human labelers that reflects your organizational and end-user needs. For this post, we store the dataset in an Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) bucket.
• A small language model with a numerical head like OPT-2.7b, Falcon 7b (a decoder-only model of approximately 6 GB is good enough).
• A mechanism to run distributed training. For this post, we use SageMaker.
• An AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) role associated with the Amazon SageMaker Studio user profile that has access to the S3 bucket holding the curated dataset. The standard SageMaker IAM role will suffice for this post. Refer to Amazon SageMaker Identity-Based Policy Examples for guidance on best practices and examples of identity-based policies for SageMaker.
• A SageMaker domain. You can quickly spin up a SageMaker domain and set up a single user for launching the SageMaker Studio notebook environment you’ll need to complete the model training. For instructions on setting up your environment, see Quick onboard to Amazon SageMaker domain.

Launch SageMaker Studio

Complete the following steps to launch SageMaker Studio:

1. On the SageMaker console, choose Studio in the navigation pane.
2. On the Studio landing page, select the domain and user profile for launching Studio.
3. Choose Open Studio.
4. To launch SageMaker Studio, choose Launch personal Studio.

Let’s see how to create a reward model locally in a SageMaker Studio notebook environment by using a pre-existing model from the Hugging Face model hub.

Prepare a human-labeled dataset and train a reward model

When doing reward modeling, getting feedback data from humans can be expensive. This is because reward modeling needs feedback from other human workers instead of only using data collected during regular system use. How well your reward model behaves depends on the quality and amount of feedback from humans.

We recommend using AWS-managed offerings such as Amazon SageMaker Ground Truth. It offers the most comprehensive set of human-in-the-loop capabilities, allowing you to harness the power of human feedback across the machine learning (ML) lifecycle to improve the accuracy and relevancy of models. You can complete a variety of human-in-the-loop tasks with SageMaker Ground Truth, from data generation and annotation to model review, customization, and evaluation, either through a self-service or AWS-managed offering.

For this post, we use the IMDB dataset to train a reward model that provides a higher score for text that humans have labeled as positive, and a lower score for negative text.

We prepare the dataset with the following code:

def create_custom_dataset(raw_dataset):
    df = raw_dataset.to_pandas()
    negative_df = df[df['label']==0]
    positive_df = df[df['label']==1]
    negative_df = negative_df.drop(
        columns=['label']).rename(
        columns={'text': 'rejected'})
    # shuffle the data
    positive_df = positive_df.sample(
        frac=1, random_state=0).reset_index(
        drop=True).drop(columns=['label']).rename(
        columns={'text': 'chosen'})
    joined_df = negative_df.join(positive_df)

    def tokenize_fn(texts, max_length=args.seq_length):
        encoded = tokenizer(
            texts,
            padding='max_length',
            max_length=max_length,
            truncation=True,
            add_special_tokens=False,
        )
        return encoded

    rejected_encoded = tokenize_fn(joined_df.rejected.values.tolist())
    joined_df['rejected_input_ids'] = rejected_encoded['input_ids']
    joined_df['rejected_attention_mask'] = rejected_encoded['attention_mask']
    encoded_chosen = tokenize_fn(joined_df.chosen.values.tolist())
    joined_df['chosen_input_ids'] = encoded_chosen['input_ids']
    joined_df['chosen_attention_mask'] = encoded_chosen['attention_mask']
    
    train_dataset = Dataset.from_pandas(joined_df, preserve_index=False)
    
    return train_dataset.with_format("torch")

The following example shows a sample record from the prepared dataset, which includes references to rejected and chosen responses. We have also embedded the input ID and attention mask for the chosen and rejected responses.

{'rejected': "If only to avoid making this type of film in the future. This film is interesting as an experiment but tells no cogent story.<br /><br />One might feel virtuous for sitting thru it because it touches on so many IMPORTANT issues but it does so without any discernable motive. The viewer comes away with no new perspectives (unless one comes up with one while one's mind wanders, as it will invariably do during this pointless film).<br /><br />One might better spend one's time staring out a window at a tree growing.<br /><br />",
 'chosen': "This is a great movie. I love it more each time i watch. Most comedies can get pretty lame because you know all the gags, but mystery men has so much integrity in the writing and characterization that watching once again -- as Ben Stiller tears at the hood ornament of the limo, or Hank Azaria says good-bye to Louise Lasser, or Geoffrey Rush flashes his fuhrer choreography, or Tom Waits mumbles while he watches the news report, or Janeane Garofalo refuses a kiss from Paul Reubens -- is a pleasure. This is pitch perfect ensemble acting. The story develops directly and consistently, the action sequences are creative and not too dominant, all the set-ups payoff by the end. Seriously, if you've seen it and it's been a while, watch it again, and if you haven't then get started. You can't watch it again until you've seen it the first time. (Wes Studi, William H. Macy, the tryouts scene. Too much good stuff!)",
 'rejected_input_ids': tensor([1106,  129,    7,  ...,    1,    1,    1]),
 'rejected_attention_mask': tensor([1, 1, 1,  ..., 0, 0, 0]),
 'chosen_input_ids': tensor([713,  16,  10,  ...,   1,   1,   1]),
 'chosen_attention_mask': tensor([1, 1, 1,  ..., 0, 0, 0])}

Load the pre-trained model

In this case, we use the OPT-1.3b (Open Pre-trained Transformer Language Model) model in Amazon SageMaker JumpStart from Hugging Face. If you want to do all of the training locally on your notebook instead of distributed training, you need to use an instance with enough accelerator memory. We run the following training on a notebook running on ml.g4dn.xlarge instance type:

from transformers import( 
      AutoModelForSequenceClassification, 
      AutoTokenizer, 
      set_seed, 
      ) 
from datasets import Dataset, load_dataset 
import torch
       
model = AutoModelForSequenceClassification.from_pretrained( 
       'facebook/opt-1.3b',
       torch_dtype=torch.bfloat16, 
       device_map="auto", 
       num_labels=1, 
 )

Define the custom trainer function

In the following code snippet, we create a custom trainer that calculates how well a model is performing on a task:

from torch import nn 
from transformers import Trainer 
import torch.nn.functional as F 

class CustomTrainer(Trainer): 
def compute_loss(self, model, inputs, return_outputs=False): 

chosen_input_ids = inputs['chosen_input_ids'] chosen_attention_mask = inputs['chosen_attention_mask'] rejected_input_ids = inputs['rejected_input_ids'] rejected_attention_mask = inputs['rejected_attention_mask'] 
r_w = model(chosen_input_ids, chosen_attention_mask).logits 
r_l = model(rejected_input_ids, rejected_attention_mask).logits outputs = (r_w, r_l) 
loss = -F.logsigmoid(r_w - r_l).mean() 
return (loss, outputs) if return_outputs else loss

It compares the model’s results for two sets of input data: one set that was chosen and another set that was rejected. The trainer then uses these results to figure out how good the model is at distinguishing between the chosen and rejected data. This helps the trainer adjust the model to improve its performance on the task. The CustomTrainer class is used to create a specialized trainer that calculates the loss function for a specific task involving chosen and rejected input sequences. This custom trainer extends the functionality of the standard Trainer class provided by the transformers library, allowing for a tailored approach to handling model outputs and loss computation based on the specific requirements of the task. See the following code:

from transformers import TrainingArguments

training_args = TrainingArguments(output_dir="reward_model",
                                  overwrite_output_dir=True,
                                 do_train=True,
                                 do_eval=False,
                                 do_predict=False,
                                 evaluation_strategy="no",
                                 learning_rate=5e-5,
                                 num_train_epochs=1,
                                 per_device_train_batch_size=2,
                                 gradient_accumulation_steps=32,
                                 remove_unused_columns=False)
trainer = CustomTrainer( 
          model=model, 
          args=training_args, 
          train_dataset=train_dataset 
          )
trainer.train()
trainer.save_model()

The TrainingArguments in the provided code snippet are used to configure various aspects of the training process for an ML model. Let’s break down the purpose of each parameter, and how they can influence the training outcome:

• output_dir – Specifies the directory where the trained model and associated files will be saved. This parameter helps organize and store the trained model for future use.
• overwrite_output_dir – Determines whether to overwrite the output directory if it already exists. Setting this to True allows for reusing the same directory without manual deletion.
• do_train – Indicates whether to perform training. If set to True, the model will be trained using the provided training dataset.
• do_eval and do_predict – Control whether to perform evaluation and prediction tasks, respectively. In this case, both are set to False, meaning only training will be conducted.
• evaluation_strategy – Defines when evaluation should be performed during training. Setting it to “no” means evaluation will not be done during training.
• learning_rate – Specifies the learning rate for the optimizer, influencing how quickly or slowly the model learns from the data.
• num_train_epochs – Sets the number of times the model will go through the entire training dataset during training. One epoch means one complete pass through all training samples.
• per_device_train_batch_size – Determines how many samples are processed in each batch during training on each device (for example, GPU). A smaller batch size can lead to slower but more stable training.
• gradient_accumulation_steps – Controls how often gradients are accumulated before updating the model’s parameters. This can help stabilize training with large batch sizes.
• remove_unused_columns – Specifies whether unused columns in the dataset should be removed before processing, optimizing memory usage.

By configuring these parameters in the TrainingArguments, you can influence various aspects of the training process, such as model performance, convergence speed, memory usage, and overall training outcome based on your specific requirements and constraints.

When you run this code, it trains the reward model based on the numerical representation of subjective feedback you gathered from the human labelers. A trained reward model will give a higher score to LLM responses that humans are more likely to prefer.

Use the reward model to evaluate the base LLM

You can now feed the response from your LLM to this reward model, and the numerical score produced as output informs you of how well the response from the LLM is aligning to the subjective organization preferences that were embedded on the reward model. The following diagram illustrates this process. You can use this number as the threshold for deciding whether or not the response from the LLM can be shared with the end-user.

For example, let’s say we created an reward model to avoiding toxic, harmful, or inappropriate content. If a chatbot powered by an LLM produces a response, the reward model can then score the chatbot’s responses. Responses with scores above a pre-determined threshold are deemed acceptable to share with users. Scores below the threshold mean the content should be blocked. This lets us automatically filter chatbot content that doesn’t meet standards we want to enforce. To explore more, see the accompanying notebook.

Clean up

To avoid incurring future charges, delete all the resources that you created. Delete the deployed SageMaker models, if any, and stop the SageMaker Studio notebook you launched for this exercise.

Conclusion

In this post, we showed how to train a reward model that predicts a human preference score from the LLM’s response. This is done by generating several outputs for each prompt with the LLM, then asking human annotators to rank or score the responses to each prompt. The reward model is then trained to predict the human preference score from the LLM’s response. After the reward model is trained, you can use the reward model to evaluate the LLM’s responses against your subjective organizational standards.

As an organization evolves, the reward functions must evolve alongside changing organizational values and user expectations. What defines a “great” AI output is subjective and transforming. Organizations need flexible ML pipelines that continually retrain reward models with updated rewards reflecting latest priorities and needs. This space is continuously evolving: direct preference-based policy optimization, tool-augmented reward modeling, and example-based control are other popular alternative techniques to align AI systems with human values and goals.

We invite you to take the next step in customizing your AI solutions by engaging with the diverse and subjective perspectives of human feedback. Embrace the power of reward modeling to ensure your AI systems resonate with your brand identity and deliver the exceptional experiences your customers deserve. Start refining your AI models today with Amazon SageMaker and join the vanguard of businesses setting new standards in personalized customer interactions. If you have any questions or feedback, please leave them in the comments section.

About the Author

Dinesh Kumar Subramani is a Senior Solutions Architect based in Edinburgh, Scotland. He specializes in artificial intelligence and machine learning, and is member of technical field community with in Amazon. Dinesh works closely with UK Central Government customers to solve their problems using AWS services. Outside of work, Dinesh enjoys spending quality time with his family, playing chess, and exploring a diverse range of music.

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Personalized customer experiences are essential for engaging today’s users. However, delivering truly personalized experiences that adapt to changes in user behavior can be both challenging and time-consuming. Amazon Personalize makes it straightforward to personalize your website, app, emails, and more, using the same machine learning (ML) technology used by Amazon, without requiring ML expertise. With the recipes—algorithms for specific uses cases—provided by Amazon Personalize, you can deliver a wide array of personalization, including product or content recommendations and personalized ranking.

Today, we are excited to announce the general availability of two advanced recipes in Amazon Personalize, User-Personalization-v2 and Personalized-Ranking-v2 (v2 recipes), which are built on the cutting-edge Transformers architecture to support larger item catalogs with lower latency.

In this post, we summarize the new enhancements, and guide you through the process of training a model and providing recommendations for your users.

Benefits of new recipes

The new recipes offer enhancements in scalability, latency, model performance, and functionality.

• Enhanced scalability – The new recipes now support training with up to 5 million item catalogs and 3 billion interactions, empowering personalization for large catalogs and platforms with billions of usage events.
• Lower latency – The lower inference latency and faster training times for large datasets of these new recipes can reduce the delay for your end-users.
• Performance optimization – Amazon Personalize testing showed that v2 recipes improved recommendation accuracy by up to 9% and recommendation coverage by up to 1.8x compared to previous versions. A higher coverage means Amazon Personalize recommends more of your catalog.
• Return item metadata in inference responses – The new recipes enable item metadata by default without extra charge, allowing you to return metadata such as genres, descriptions, and availability in inference responses. This can help you enrich recommendations in your user interfaces without extra work. If you use Amazon Personalize with generative AI, you can also feed the metadata into prompts. Providing more context to large language models can help them gain a deeper understanding of product attributes to generate more relevant content.
• Highly automated operations – Our new recipes are designed to reduce your overhead for training and tuning the model. For example, Amazon Personalize simplifies training configuration and automatically selects the optimal settings for your custom models behind the scenes.

Solution overview

To use the User-Personalization-v2 and Personalized-Ranking-v2 recipes, you first need to set up Amazon Personalize resources. Create your dataset group, import your data, train a solution version, and deploy a campaign. For full instructions, see Getting started.

For this post, we follow the Amazon Personalize console approach to deploy a campaign. Alternatively, you can build the entire solution using the SDK approach. You can also get batch recommendations with an asynchronous batch flow. We use the MovieLens public dataset and User-Personalization-v2 recipe to show you the workflow.

Prepare the dataset

Complete the following steps to prepare your dataset:

1. Create a dataset group. Each dataset group can contain up to three datasets: users, items, and interactions, with the interactions dataset being mandatory for User-Personalization-v2 and Personalized-Ranking-v2.
2. Create an interactions dataset using a schema.
3. Import the interactions data to Amazon Personalize from Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3).

Train a model

After the dataset import job is complete, you can analyze data before training. Amazon Personalize Data analysis shows you statistics about your data as well as actions you can take to meet training requirements and improve recommendations.

Now you’re ready to train your model.

1. On the Amazon Personalize console, choose Dataset groups in the navigation pane.
2. Choose your dataset group.
3. Choose Create solutions.
4. For Solution name, enter your solution name.
5. For Solution type, select Item recommendation.
6. For Recipe, choose the new aws-user-personalization-v2 recipe.
   
7. In the Training configuration section, for Automatic training, select Turn on to maintain the effectiveness of your model by retraining it on a regular cadence.
   
8. Under Hyperparameter configuration, select Apply recency bias. Recency bias determines whether the model should give more weight to the most recent item interactions data in your interactions dataset.
   
9. Choose Create solution.

If you turned on automatic training, Amazon Personalize will automatically create your first solution version. A solution version refers to a trained ML model. When a solution version is created for the solution, Amazon Personalize trains the model backing the solution version based on the recipe and training configuration. It can take up to 1 hour for the solution version creation to start.

10. Under Custom resources in the navigation pane, choose Campaigns.
11. Choose Create campaign.

A campaign deploys a solution version (trained model) to generate real-time recommendations. Campaigns created with solutions trained on v2 recipes are automatically opted-in to include item metadata in recommendation results. You can choose metadata columns during an inference call.

12. Provide your campaign details and create your campaign.
    

Get recommendations

After you create or update your campaign, you can get a recommended list of items that users are more likely to interact with, sorted from highest to lowest.

1. Select the campaign and View details.
2. In the Test campaign results section, enter the User ID and choose Get recommendations.
   

The following table shows a recommendation result for a user that includes the recommended items, relevance score, and item metadata (Title and Genre).

Your User-Personalization-v2 campaign is now ready to feed into your website or app and personalize the journey of each of your customers.

Clean up

Make sure you clean up any unused resources you created in your account while following the steps outlined in this post. You can delete campaigns, datasets, and dataset groups via the Amazon Personalize console or using the Python SDK.

Conclusion

The new Amazon Personalize User-Personalization-v2 and Personalized-Ranking-v2 recipes take personalization to the next level with support of larger item catalogs, reduced latency, and optimized performance. For more information about Amazon Personalize, see the Amazon Personalize Developer Guide.

About the Authors

Jingwen Hu is a Senior Technical Product Manager working with AWS AI/ML on the Amazon Personalize team. In her spare time, she enjoys traveling and exploring local food.

Daniel Foley is a Senior Product Manager for Amazon Personalize. He is focused on building applications that leverage artificial intelligence to solve our customers’ largest challenges. Outside of work, Dan is an avid skier and hiker.

Pranesh Anubhav is a Senior Software Engineer for Amazon Personalize. He is passionate about designing machine learning systems to serve customers at scale. Outside of his work, he loves playing soccer and is an avid follower of Real Madrid.

Tianmin Liu is a senior software engineer working for Amazon personalize. He focuses on developing recommender systems at scale using various machine learning algorithms. In his spare time, he likes playing video games, watching sports, and playing the piano.

Abhishek Mangal is a software engineer working for Amazon Personalize. He works on developing recommender systems at scale using various machine learning algorithms. In his spare time, he likes to watch anime and believes One Piece is the greatest piece of storytelling in recent history.

Yifei Ma is a Senior Applied Scientist at AWS AI Labs working on recommender systems. His research interests lie in active learning, generative models, time series analysis, and online decision-making. Outside of work, he is an aviation enthusiast.

Hao Ding is a Senior Applied Scientist at AWS AI Labs and is working on advancing the recommender system for Amazon Personalize. His research interests lie in recommendation foundation models, Bayesian deep learning, large language models, and their applications in recommendation.

Rishabh Agrawal is a Senior Software Engineer working on AI services at AWS. In his spare time, he enjoys hiking, traveling and reading.

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