Monthly Archives: July 2024

In today’s digital landscape, the protection of personally identifiable information (PII) is not just a regulatory requirement, but a cornerstone of consumer trust and business integrity. Organizations use advanced natural language detection services like Amazon Lex for building conversational interfaces and Amazon CloudWatch for monitoring and analyzing operational data.

One risk many organizations face is the inadvertent exposure of sensitive data through logs, voice chat transcripts, and metrics. This risk is exacerbated by the increasing sophistication of cyber threats and the stringent penalties associated with data protection violations. Dealing with massive datasets is not just about identifying and categorizing PII. The challenge also lies in implementing robust mechanisms to obfuscate and redact this sensitive data. At the same time, it’s crucial to make sure these security measures don’t undermine the functionality and analytics critical to business operations.

This post addresses this pressing pain point, offering prescriptive guidance on safeguarding PII through detection and masking techniques specifically tailored for environments using Amazon Lex and CloudWatch Logs.

Solution overview

To address this critical challenge, our solution uses the slot obfuscation feature in Amazon Lex and the data protection capabilities of CloudWatch Logs, tailored specifically for detecting and protecting PII in logs.

In Amazon Lex, slots are used to capture and store user input during a conversation. Slots are placeholders within an intent that represent an action the user wants to perform. For example, in a flight booking bot, slots might include departure city, destination city, and travel dates. Slot obfuscation makes sure any information collected through Amazon Lex conversational interfaces, such as names, addresses, or any other PII entered by users, is obfuscated at the point of capture. This method reduces the risk of sensitive data exposure in chat logs and playbacks.

In CloudWatch Logs, data protection and custom identifiers add an additional layer of security by enabling the masking of PII within session attributes, input transcripts, and other sensitive log data that is specific to your organization.

This approach minimizes the footprint of sensitive information across these services and helps with compliance with data protection regulations.

In the following sections, we demonstrate how to identify and classify your data, locate your sensitive data, and finally monitor and protect it, both in transit and at rest, especially in areas where it may inadvertently appear. The following are the four ways to do this:

• Amazon Lex – Monitor and protect data with Amazon Lex using slot obfuscation and selective conversation log capture
• CloudWatch Logs – Monitor and protect data with CloudWatch Logs using playbacks and log group policies
• Amazon S3 – Monitor and protect data with Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) using bucket security and encryption
• Service Control Policies – Monitor and protect with data governance controls and risk management policies using Service Control Policies (SCPs) to prevent changes to Amazon Lex chatbots and CloudWatch Logs groups, and restrict unmasked data viewing in CloudWatch Logs Insights

Identify and classify your data

The first step is to identify and classify the data flowing through your systems. This involves understanding the types of information processed and determining their sensitivity level.

To determine all the slots in an intent in Amazon Lex, complete the following steps:

1. On the Amazon Lex console, choose Bots in the navigation pane.
2. Choose your preferred bot.
3. In the navigation pane, choose the locale under All Languages and choose Intents.
4. Choose the required intent from the list.
5. In the Slots section, make note of all the slots within the intent.

After you identify the slots within the intent, it’s important to classify them according to their sensitivity level and the potential impact of unauthorized access or disclosure. For example, you may have the following data types:

• Name
• Address
• Phone number
• Email address
• Account number

Email address and physical mailing address are often considered a medium classification level. Sensitive data, such as name, account number, and phone number, should be tagged with a high classification level, indicating the need for stringent security measures. These guidelines can help with systematically evaluating data.

Locate your data stores

After you classify the data, the next step is to locate where this data resides or is processed in your systems and applications. For services involving Amazon Lex and CloudWatch, it’s crucial to identify all data stores and their roles in handling PII.

CloudWatch captures logs generated by Amazon Lex, including interaction logs that might contain PII. Regular audits and monitoring of these logs are essential to detect any unauthorized access or anomalies in data handling.

Amazon S3 is often used in conjunction with Amazon Lex for storing call recordings or transcripts, which may contain sensitive information. Making sure these storage buckets are properly configured with encryption, access controls, and lifecycle policies are vital to protect the stored data.

Organizations can create a robust framework for protection by identifying and classifying data, along with pinpointing the data stores (like CloudWatch and Amazon S3). This framework should include regular audits, access controls, and data encryption to prevent unauthorized access and comply with data protection laws.

Monitor and protect data with Amazon Lex

In this section, we demonstrate how to protect your data with Amazon Lex using slot obfuscation and selective conversation log capture.

Slot obfuscation in Amazon Lex

Sensitive information can appear in the input transcripts of conversation logs. It’s essential to implement mechanisms that detect and mask or redact PII in these transcripts before they are stored or logged.

In the development of conversational interfaces using Amazon Lex, safeguarding PII is crucial to maintain user privacy and comply with data protection regulations. Slot obfuscation provides a mechanism to automatically obscure PII within conversation logs, making sure sensitive information is not exposed. When configuring an intent within an Amazon Lex bot, developers can mark specific slots—placeholders for user-provided information—as obfuscated. This setting tells Amazon Lex to replace the actual user input for these slots with a placeholder in the logs. For instance, enabling obfuscation for slots designed to capture sensitive information like account numbers or phone numbers makes sure any matching input is masked in the conversation log. Slot obfuscation allows developers to significantly reduce the risk of inadvertently logging sensitive information, thereby enhancing the privacy and security of the conversational application. It’s a best practice to identify and mark all slots that could potentially capture PII during the bot design phase to provide comprehensive protection across the conversation flow.

To enable obfuscation for a slot from the Amazon Lex console, complete the following steps:

1. On the Amazon Lex console, choose Bots in the navigation pane.
2. Choose your preferred bot.
3. In the navigation pane, choose the locale under All Languages and choose Intents.
4. Choose your preferred intent from the list.
5. In the Slots section, expand the slot details.
6. Choose Advanced options to access additional settings.
7. Select Enable slot obfuscation.
8. Choose Update slot to save the changes.

Selective conversation log capture

Amazon Lex offers capabilities to select how conversation logs are captured with text and audio data from live conversations by enabling the filtering of certain types of information from the conversation logs. Through selective capture of necessary data, businesses can minimize the risk of exposing private or confidential information. Additionally, this feature can help organizations comply with data privacy regulations, because it gives more control over the data collected and stored. There is a choice between text, audio, or text and audio logs.

When selective conversation log capture is enabled for text and audio logs, it disables logging for all intents and slots in the conversation. To generate text and audio logs for particular intents and slots, set the text and audio selective conversation log capture session attributes for those intents and slots to “true”. When selective conversation log capture is enabled, any slot values in SessionState, Interpretations, and Transcriptions for which logging is not enabled using session attributes will be obfuscated in the generated text log.

To enable selective conversation log capture, complete the following steps:

1. On the Amazon Lex console, choose Bots in the navigation pane.
2. Choose your preferred bot.
3. Choose Aliases under Deployment and choose the bot’s alias.
4. Choose Manage conversation logs.
5. Select Selectively log utterances.
   1. For text logs, choose a CloudWatch log group.
   2. For audio logs, choose an S3 bucket to store the logs and assign an AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) key for added security.
6. Save the changes.

Now selective conversation log capture for a slot is activated.

7. Choose Intents in the navigation pane and choose your intent.
8. Under Initial responses, choose Advanced options and expand Set values.
9. For Session attributes, set the following attributes based on the intents and slots for which you want to enable selective conversation log capture. This will capture utterances that contain only a specific slot in the conversation.
   1. x-amz-lex:enable-audio-logging:<intent>:<slot> = "true"
   2. x-amz-lex:enable-text-logging:<intent>:<slot> = "true"
10. Choose Update options and rebuild the bot.

Replace <intent> and <slot> with respective intent and slot names.

Monitor and protect data with CloudWatch Logs

In this section, we demonstrate how to protect your data with CloudWatch using playbacks and log group policies.

Playbacks in CloudWatch Logs

When Amazon Lex engages in interactions, delivering prompts or messages from the bot to the customer, there’s a potential risk for PII to be inadvertently included in these communications. This risk extends to CloudWatch Logs, where these interactions are recorded for monitoring, debugging, and analysis purposes. The playback of prompts or messages designed to confirm or clarify user input can inadvertently expose sensitive information if not properly handled. To mitigate this risk and protect PII within these interactions, a strategic approach is necessary when designing and deploying Amazon Lex bots.

The solution lies in carefully structuring how slot values, which may contain PII, are referenced and used in the bot’s response messages. Adopting a prescribed format for passing slot values, specifically by encapsulating them within curly braces (for example, {slotName}), allows developers to control how this information is presented back to the user and logged in CloudWatch. This method makes sure that when the bot constructs a message, it refers to the slot by its name rather than its value, thereby preventing any sensitive information from being directly included in the message content. For example, instead of the bot saying, “Is your phone number 123-456-7890? ” it would use a generic placeholder, “Is your phone number {PhoneNumber}? ” with {PhoneNumber} being a reference to the slot that captured the user’s phone number. This approach allows the bot to confirm or clarify information without exposing the actual data.

When these interactions are logged in CloudWatch, the logs will only contain the slot name references, not the actual PII. This technique significantly reduces the risk of sensitive information being exposed in logs, enhancing privacy and compliance with data protection regulations. Organizations should make sure all personnel involved in bot design and deployment are trained on these practices to consistently safeguard user information across all interactions.

The following is a sample AWS Lambda function code in Python for referencing the slot value of a phone number provided by the user. SML tags are used to format the slot value to provide slow and clear speech output, and returning a response to confirm the correctness of the captured phone number:

def lambda_handler(event, context):
    # Extract the intent name from the event
    intent_name = event['sessionState']['intent']['name']
    # Extract the slots from the event
    slots = event['sessionState']['intent']['slots']

    # Check if the intent name is 'INTENT_NAME'
     if intent_name == 'INTENT_NAME':
         # Retrieve the phone number from the 'SLOT_NAME' slot
         phone_number = slots['SLOT_NAME']['value']['interpretedValue']
        
        # Create an SSML-formatted message with the phone number
        msg = f'''<speak>
                Thank you for providing your phone number. Is 
                <prosody rate="slow">
                <say-as interpret-as="telephone">{phone_number}</say-as>
                </prosody> correct?
                </speak>'''
        
        # Create a message array
        message_array = [
            {
                'contentType': 'SSML',
                'content': msg
            }
        ]
        
        # Response with the dialog action, intent state, and the message array
        response = {
            'sessionState': {
                'dialogAction': {
                    'type': 'Close'
                },
                'intent': {
                    'name': intent_name,
                    'state': 'Fulfilled'
                }
            },
            'messages': message_array
        }
    else:
        # Generic response for unhandled intents
        response = {
            'sessionState': {
                'dialogAction': {
                    'type': 'Close'
                },
                'intent': {
                    'name': intent_name,
                    'state': 'Fulfilled'
                }
            },
            'messages': [
                {
                    'contentType': 'PlainText',
                    'content': 'I apologize, but I am unable to assist.'
                }
            ]
        }
    return response

Replace INTENT_NAME and SLOT_NAME with your preferred intent and slot names, respectively.

CloudWatch data protection log group policies for data identifiers

Sensitive data that’s ingested by CloudWatch Logs can be safeguarded by using log group data protection policies. These policies allow to audit and mask sensitive data that appears in log events ingested by the log groups in your account.

CloudWatch Logs supports both managed and custom data identifiers.

Managed data identifiers offer preconfigured data types to protect financial data, personal health information (PHI), and PII. For some types of managed data identifiers, the detection depends on also finding certain keywords in proximity with the sensitive data.

Each managed data identifier is designed to detect a specific type of sensitive data, such as name, email address, account numbers, AWS secret access keys, or passport numbers for a particular country or region. When creating a data protection policy, you can configure it to use these identifiers to analyze logs ingested by the log group, and take actions when they are detected.

CloudWatch Logs data protection can detect the categories of sensitive data by using managed data identifiers.

To configure managed data identifiers on the CloudWatch console, complete the following steps:

1. On the CloudWatch console, under Logs in the navigation pane, choose Log groups.
2. Select your log group and on the Actions menu, choose Create data protection policy.
3. Under Auditing and masking configuration, for Managed data identifiers, select all the identifiers for which data protection policy should be applied.
4. Choose the data store to apply the policy to and save the changes.

Custom data identifiers let you define your own custom regular expressions that can be used in your data protection policy. With custom data identifiers, you can target business-specific PII use cases that managed data identifiers don’t provide. For example, you can use custom data identifiers to look for a company-specific account number format.

To create a custom data identifier on the CloudWatch console, complete the following steps:

1. On the CloudWatch console, under Logs in the navigation pane, choose Log groups.
2. Select your log group and on the Actions menu, choose Create data protection policy.
3. Under Custom Data Identifier configuration, choose Add custom data identifier.
4. Create your own regex patterns to identify sensitive information that is unique to your organization or specific use case.
5. After you add your data identifier, choose the data store to apply this policy to.
6. Choose Activate data protection.

For details about the types of data that can be protected, refer to Types of data that you can protect.

Monitor and protect data with Amazon S3

In this section, we demonstrate how to protect your data in S3 buckets.

Encrypt audio recordings in S3 buckets

PII can often be captured in audio recordings, especially in sectors like customer service, healthcare, and financial services, where sensitive information is frequently exchanged over voice interactions. To comply with domain-specific regulatory requirements, organizations must adopt stringent measures for managing PII in audio files.

One approach is to disable the recording feature entirely if it poses too high a risk of non-compliance or if the value of the recordings doesn’t justify the potential privacy implications. However, if audio recordings are essential, streaming the audio data in real time using Amazon Kinesis provides a scalable and secure method to capture, process, and analyze audio data. This data can then be exported to a secure and compliant storage solution, such as Amazon S3, which can be configured to meet specific compliance needs including encryption at rest. You can use AWS KMS or AWS CloudHSM to manage encryption keys, offering robust mechanisms to encrypt audio files at rest, thereby securing the sensitive information they might contain. Implementing these encryption measures makes sure that even if data breaches occur, the encrypted PII remains inaccessible to unauthorized parties.

Configuring these AWS services allows organizations to balance the need for audio data capture with the imperative to protect sensitive information and comply with regulatory standards.

S3 bucket security configurations

You can use an AWS CloudFormation template to configure various security settings for an S3 bucket that stores Amazon Lex data like audio recordings and logs. For more information, see Creating a stack on the AWS CloudFormation console. See the following example code:

AWSTemplateFormatVersion: '2010-09-09'
Description: Create a secure S3 bucket with KMS encryption to store Lex Data
Resources:
  S3Bucket:
    Type: AWS::S3::Bucket
    Properties:
      BucketName: YOUR_LEX_DATA_BUCKET
      AccessControl: Private
      PublicAccessBlockConfiguration:
        BlockPublicAcls: true
        BlockPublicPolicy: true
        IgnorePublicAcls: true
        RestrictPublicBuckets: true
      BucketEncryption:
        ServerSideEncryptionConfiguration:
          - ServerSideEncryptionByDefault:
              SSEAlgorithm: aws:kms
              KMSMasterKeyID: alias/aws/s3 
      VersioningConfiguration:
        Status: Enabled
      ObjectLockConfiguration:
        ObjectLockEnabled: Enabled
        Rule:
          DefaultRetention:
            Mode: GOVERNANCE
            Years: 5
      LoggingConfiguration:
        DestinationBucketName: !Ref YOUR_SERVER_ACCESS_LOG_BUCKET
        LogFilePrefix: lex-bucket-logs/

The template defines the following properties:

• BucketName– Specifies your bucket. Replace YOUR_LEX_DATA_BUCKET with your preferred bucket name.
• AccessControl – Sets the bucket access control to Private, denying public access by default.
• PublicAccessBlockConfiguration – Explicitly blocks all public access to the bucket and its objects
• BucketEncryption – Enables server-side encryption using the default KMS encryption key ID, alias/aws/s3, managed by AWS for Amazon S3. You can also create custom KMS keys. For instructions, refer to Creating symmetric encryption KMS keys
• VersioningConfiguration – Enables versioning for the bucket, allowing you to maintain multiple versions of objects.
• ObjectLockConfiguration – Enables object lock with a governance mode retention period of 5 years, preventing objects from being deleted or overwritten during that period.
• LoggingConfiguration – Enables server access logging for the bucket, directing log files to a separate logging bucket for auditing and analysis purposes. Replace YOUR_SERVER_ACCESS_LOG_BUCKET with your preferred bucket name.

This is just an example; you may need to adjust the configurations based on your specific requirements and security best practices.

Monitor and protect with data governance controls and risk management policies

In this section, we demonstrate how to protect your data with using a Service Control Policy (SCP). To create an SCP, see Creating an SCP.

Prevent changes to an Amazon Lex chatbot using an SCP

To prevent changes to an Amazon Lex chatbot using an SCP, create one that denies the specific actions related to modifying or deleting the chatbot. For example, you could use the following SCP:

{
  "Version": "2012-10-17",
  "Statement": [
    {
      "Effect": "Deny",
      "Action": [
        "lex:DeleteBot",
        "lex:DeleteBotAlias",
        "lex:DeleteBotChannelAssociation",
        "lex:DeleteBotVersion",
        "lex:DeleteIntent",
        "lex:DeleteSlotType",
        "lex:DeleteUtterances",
        "lex:PutBot",
        "lex:PutBotAlias",
        "lex:PutIntent",
        "lex:PutSlotType"
      ],
      "Resource": [
        "arn:aws:lex:*:YOUR_ACCOUNT_ID:bot:YOUR_BOT_NAME",
        "arn:aws:lex:*:YOUR_ACCOUNT_ID:intent:YOUR_BOT_NAME:*",
        "arn:aws:lex:*:YOUR_ACCOUNT_ID:slottype:YOUR_BOT_NAME:*"
      ],
      "Condition": {
        "StringEquals": {
          "aws:PrincipalArn": "arn:aws:iam::YOUR_ACCOUNT_ID:role/YOUR_IAM_ROLE"
        }
      }
    }
  ]
}

The code defines the following:

• Effect – This is set to Deny, which means that the specified actions will be denied.
• Action – This contains a list of actions related to modifying or deleting Amazon Lex bots, bot aliases, intents, and slot types.
• Resource – This lists the Amazon Resource Names (ARNs) for your Amazon Lex bot, intents, and slot types. Replace YOUR_ACCOUNT_ID with your AWS account ID and YOUR_BOT_NAME with the name of your Amazon Lex bot.
• Condition – This makes sure the policy only applies to actions performed by a specific IAM role. Replace YOUR_ACCOUNT_ID with your AWS account ID and YOUR_IAM_ROLE with the name of the AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) provisioned role you want this policy to apply to.

When this SCP is attached to an AWS Organizations organizational unit (OU) or an individual AWS account, it will allow only the specified provisioning role while preventing all other IAM entities (users, roles, or groups) within that OU or account from modifying or deleting the specified Amazon Lex bot, intents, and slot types.

This SCP only prevents changes to the Amazon Lex bot and its components. It doesn’t restrict other actions, such as invoking the bot or retrieving its configuration. If more actions need to be restricted, you can add them to the Action list in the SCP.

Prevent changes to a CloudWatch Logs log group using an SCP

To prevent changes to a CloudWatch Logs log group using an SCP, create one that denies the specific actions related to modifying or deleting the log group. The following is an example SCP that you can use:

{
  "Version": "2012-10-17",
  "Statement": [
    {
      "Effect": "Deny",
      "Action": [
        "logs:DeleteLogGroup",
        "logs:PutRetentionPolicy"
      ],
      "Resource": "arn:aws:logs:*:YOUR_ACCOUNT_ID:log-group:/aws/YOUR_LOG_GROUP_NAME*",
      "Condition": {
        "StringEquals": {
          "aws:PrincipalArn": "arn:aws:iam::YOUR_ACCOUNT_ID:role/YOUR_IAM_ROLE"
        }
      }
    }
  ]
}

The code defines the following:

• Effect – This is set to Deny, which means that the specified actions will be denied.
• Action – This includes logs:DeleteLogGroup and logs:PutRetentionPolicy actions, which prevent deleting the log group and modifying its retention policy, respectively.
• Resource – This lists the ARN for your CloudWatch Logs log group. Replace YOUR_ACCOUNT_ID with your AWS account ID and YOUR_LOG_GROUP_NAME with the name of your log group.
• Condition – This makes sure the policy only applies to actions performed by a specific IAM role. Replace YOUR_ACCOUNT_ID with your AWS account ID and YOUR_IAM_ROLE with the name of the IAM provisioned role you want this policy to apply to.

Similar to the preceding chatbot SCP, when this SCP is attached to an Organizations OU or an individual AWS account, it will allow only the specified provisioning role to delete the specified CloudWatch Logs log group or modify its retention policy, while preventing all other IAM entities (users, roles, or groups) within that OU or account from performing these actions.

This SCP only prevents changes to the log group itself and its retention policy. It doesn’t restrict other actions, such as creating or deleting log streams within the log group or modifying other log group configurations. To restrict additional actions, add it to the Action list in the SCP.

Also, this SCP will apply to all log groups that match the specified resource ARN pattern. To target a specific log group, modify the Resource value accordingly.

Restrict viewing of unmasked sensitive data in CloudWatch Logs Insights using an SCP

When you create a data protection policy, by default, any sensitive data that matches the data identifiers you’ve selected is masked at all egress points, including CloudWatch Logs Insights, metric filters, and subscription filters. Only users who have the logs:Unmask IAM permission can view unmasked data. The following is an SCP you can use:

{
  "Version": "2012-10-17",
  "Statement": [
    {
      "Sid": "RestrictUnmasking",
      "Effect": "Deny",
      "Action": "logs:Unmask",
      "Resource": "arn:aws:logs:*:YOUR_ACCOUNT_ID:log-group:YOUR_LOG_GROUP:*",
      "Condition": {
        "StringEquals": {
          "aws:PrincipalArn": "arn:aws:iam::YOUR_ACCOUNT_ID:role/YOUR_IAM_ROLE"
        }
      }
    }
  ]
}

It defines the following:

• Effect – This is set to Deny, which means that the specified actions will be denied.
• Action – This includes logs:Unmask, which prevents viewing of masked data.
• Resource – This lists the ARN for your CloudWatch Logs log group. Replace YOUR_ACCOUNT_ID with your AWS account ID and YOUR_LOG_GROUP_NAME with the name of your log group.
• Condition – This makes sure the policy only applies to actions performed by a specific IAM role. Replace YOUR_ACCOUNT_ID with your AWS account ID and YOUR_IAM_ROLE with the name of the IAM provisioned role you want this policy to apply to.

Similar to the previous SCPs, when this SCP is attached to an Organizations OU or an individual AWS account, it will allow only the specified provisioning role while preventing all other IAM entities (users, roles, or groups) within that OU or account from unmasking sensitive data from the CloudWatch Logs log group.

Similar to the previous log group service control policy, this SCP only prevents changes to the log group itself and its retention policy. It doesn’t restrict other actions such as creating or deleting log streams within the log group or modifying other log group configurations. To restrict additional actions, add them to the Action list in the SCP.

Also, this SCP will apply to all log groups that match the specified resource ARN pattern. To target a specific log group, modify the Resource value accordingly.

Clean up

To avoid incurring additional charges, clean up your resources:

1. Delete the Amazon Lex bot:
   1. On the Amazon Lex console, choose Bots in the navigation pane.
   2. Select the bot to delete and on the Action menu, choose Delete.
2. Delete the associated Lambda function:
   1. On the Lambda console, choose Functions in the navigation pane.
   2. Select the function associated with the bot and on the Action menu, choose Delete.
3. Delete the account-level data protection policy. For instructions, see DeleteAccountPolicy.
4. Delete the CloudFormation log group policy:
   1. On the CloudWatch console, under Logs in the navigation pane, choose Log groups.
   2. Choose your log group.
   3. On the Data protection tab, under Log group policy, choose the Actions menu and choose Delete policy.
5. Delete the S3 bucket that stores the Amazon Lex data:
   1. On the Amazon S3 console, choose Buckets in the navigation pane.
   2. Select the bucket you want to delete, then choose Delete.
   3. To confirm that you want to delete the bucket, enter the bucket name and choose Delete bucket.
6. Delete the CloudFormation stack. For instructions, see Deleting a stack on the AWS CloudFormation console.
7. Delete the SCP. For instructions, see Deleting an SCP.
8. Delete the KMS key. For instructions, see Deleting AWS KMS keys.

Conclusion

Securing PII within AWS services like Amazon Lex and CloudWatch requires a comprehensive and proactive approach. By following the steps in this post—identifying and classifying data, locating data stores, monitoring and protecting data in transit and at rest, and implementing SCPs for Amazon Lex and Amazon CloudWatch—organizations can create a robust security framework. This framework not only protects sensitive data, but also complies with regulatory standards and mitigates potential risks associated with data breaches and unauthorized access.

Emphasizing the need for regular audits, continuous monitoring, and updating security measures in response to emerging threats and technological advancements is crucial. Adopting these practices allows organizations to safeguard their digital assets, maintain customer trust, and build a reputation for strong data privacy and security in the digital landscape.

About the Authors

Rashmica Gopinath is a software development engineer with Amazon Lex. Rashmica is responsible for developing new features, improving the service’s performance and reliability, and ensuring a seamless experience for customers building conversational applications. Rashmica is dedicated to creating innovative solutions that enhance human-computer interaction. In her free time, she enjoys winding down with the works of Dostoevsky or Kafka.

Dipkumar Mehta is a Principal Consultant with the Amazon ProServe Natural Language AI team. He focuses on helping customers design, deploy, and scale end-to-end Conversational AI solutions in production on AWS. He is also passionate about improving customer experience and driving business outcomes by leveraging data. Additionally, Dipkumar has a deep interest in Generative AI, exploring its potential to revolutionize various industries and enhance AI-driven applications.

David Myers is a Sr. Technical Account Manager with AWS Enterprise Support . With over 20 years of technical experience observability has been part of his career from the start. David loves improving customers observability experiences at Amazon Web Services.

Sam Patel is a Security Consultant specializing in safeguarding Generative AI (GenAI), Artificial Intelligence systems, and Large Language Models (LLM) for Fortune 500 companies. Serving as a trusted advisor, he invents and spearheads the development of cutting-edge best practices for secure AI deployment, empowering organizations to leverage transformative AI capabilities while maintaining stringent security and privacy standards.

Read More

Today, we are excited to announce AWS Trainium and AWS Inferentia support for fine-tuning and inference of the Llama 3.1 models. The Llama 3.1 family of multilingual large language models (LLMs) is a collection of pre-trained and instruction tuned generative models in 8B, 70B, and 405B sizes. In a previous post, we covered how to deploy Llama 3 models on AWS Trainium and Inferentia based instances in Amazon SageMaker JumpStart. In this post, we outline how to get started with fine-tuning and deploying the Llama 3.1 family of models on AWS AI chips, to realize their price-performance benefits.

Overview of Llama 3.1 models

The Llama 3.1 family of multilingual LLMs are a collection of pre-trained and instruction tuned generative models in 8B, 70B, and 405B sizes (text in/text and code out). All models support long context length (128k) and are optimized for inference with support for grouped query attention (GQA).

The Llama 3.1 instruction tuned models (8B, 70B, 405B) are optimized for multilingual dialogue use cases and outperform many of the available publicly available chat models on common industry benchmarks. They have been trained to generate tool calls for a few specific tools for capabilities like search, image generation, code execution, and mathematical reasoning. In addition, they support zero-shot tool use.

Llama 3.1 405B is the world’s largest publicly available LLM according to Meta. The model sets a new standard for artificial intelligence (AI) and is ideal for enterprise-level applications and research and development. It’s ideal for tasks like synthetic data generation, where the outputs of the model can be used to improve smaller Llama models after fine-tuning, and model distillations to transfer knowledge to smaller models from the 405B model. This model excels at general knowledge, long-form text generation, multilingual translation, machine translation, coding, math, tool use, enhanced contextual understanding, and advanced reasoning and decision-making.

Architecturally, the core LLM for Llama 3 and Llama 3.1 has the same dense architecture. They are auto-regressive language models that use an optimized transformer architecture. The tuned versions use supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF) to align with human preferences for helpfulness and safety.

The responsible use guide from Meta can assist you in implementing additional fine-tuning that may be necessary to customize and optimize the models with appropriate safety mitigations.

Trainium powers Llama 3.1 on Amazon Bedrock and Amazon SageMaker

The fastest way to get started with Llama 3.1 on AWS is through Amazon Bedrock, which is powered by our purpose-built AI infrastructure including AWS Trainium. Through its fully managed API, Amazon Bedrock delivers the benefits of our purpose-built AI infrastructure and simplifies access to these powerful models so you can focus on building differentiated AI applications.

If you need greater control over the underlying resources, you can fine-tune and deploy Llama 3.1 models with SageMaker. Trainium support for Llama 3.1 in SageMaker JumpStart is coming soon.

AWS Trainium and AWS Inferentia2 enable high performance and low cost for Llama 3.1 models

If you want to build your own ML pipelines for training and inference for greater flexibility and control, you can get started with Llama 3.1 on AWS AI chips using Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) Trn1 and Inf2 instances. Let’s see how you can get started with the new Llama 3.1 8/70B models on Trainium using the AWS Neuron SDK.

Fine-tune Llama 3.1 on Trainium

To get started with fine-tuning either Llama 3.1 8B or Llama 3.1 70B, you can use the NeuronX Distributed library. NeuronX Distributed provides implementations of some of the more popular distributed training and inference techniques. To start fine-tuning, you can use the following samples:

• Training Llama 3.1 8B
• Training Llama 3.1 70B

Both samples are built on top of AWS ParallelCluster to manage the Trainium cluster infrastructure and Slurm for workload management. The following is the example Slurm command to initiate training for Llama3.1 70B:

sbatch --exclusive 
--nodes 32 
--cpus-per-task 128 
--wrap="srun bash $(pwd)/run_llama3_70B_tp_pp.sh"

Inside the Slurm script, we launch a distributed training process on our cluster. In the runner scripts, we load the pre-trained weights and configuration provided by Meta, and launch the training process: 

torchrun $DISTRIBUTED_ARGS run_llama_nxd.py 
    —train_batch_size $BS 
    —use_meta_device_init 1 
    —training_dir $DATA_PATH 
    —training_config $SCRIPT_DIR/${MODEL_SIZE}config_llama${LLAMA_VERSION} 
    —max_steps $max_steps 
    —seq_len $SEQ_LEN 
    —pipeline_parallel_size $PP_DEGREE 
    —tensor_parallel_size $TP_DEGREE 
    —num_microbatches $NUM_MICROBATCHES 
    —lr 0.000015 
    —min_lr 1e-06 
    —beta1 0.9 
    —beta2 0.95 
    —weight_decay 0.1 
    —warmup_steps 2000 
    —constant_steps 0 
    —use_zero1_optimizer 1 
    —use_selective_checkpoint 1 
    —use_flash_attention 1 
    —qkv_linear 1 
    —kv_replicator 4 
    —pretrained_weight 1 
    —save_load_xser 1 
    —checkpoint_dir "/shared/llama${LLAMA_VERSION}${MODEL_SIZE}/" 
    —checkpoint_freq $checkpoint_freq 
    —num_kept_checkpoint -1 
    —loading_step -1 
    —tb_dir $tb_dir |& tee $LOG_PATH/log
exit ${PIPESTATUS[0]}

Deploy Llama 3.1 on Trainium

When your model is ready to deploy, you can do so by updating the model ID in the previous Llama 3 8B Neuron sample code:

model_id = "meta-llama/Meta-Llama-3.1-8B"
neuron_model = LlamaForSampling.from_pretrained(model_id, neuron_config=neuron_config, batch_size=1, tp_degree=24, amp='bf16', n_positions=4096)
neuron_model.to_neuron()

You can use the same sample inference code:

tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained(model_id)
prompt = "Hello, I'm a language model and I like to"
input_ids = tokenizer.encode(prompt, return_tensors="pt")

# run inference with top-k sampling
with torch.inference_mode():
    start = time.time()
    generated_sequences = neuron_model.sample(input_ids, sequence_length=2048, top_k=50)
    elapsed = time.time() - start

generated_sequences = [tokenizer.decode(seq) for seq in generated_sequences]
print(f'generated sequences {generated_sequences} in {elapsed} seconds')

For step-by-step details, refer to the new Llama 3.1 examples:

• Meta Llama 3.1 8B
• Meta Llama 3.1 70B
• Meta Llama 3.1 8B 32k
• Meta Llama 3.1 405B on Trainium is coming soon

You can also use Hugging Face’s Optimum Neuron library to quickly deploy models directly from SageMaker through the Hugging Face Model Hub. From the Llama 3.1 model card hub, choose Deploy, then SageMaker, and finally AWS Inferentia & Trainium. Copy the example code into a SageMaker notebook, then choose Run.

import json
import sagemaker
import boto3
from sagemaker.huggingface import HuggingFaceModel, get_huggingface_llm_image_uri

try:
    role = sagemaker.get_execution_role()
except ValueError:
    iam = boto3.client("iam")
    role = iam.get_role(RoleName="sagemaker_execution_role")["Role"]["Arn"]

# Hub Model configuration. https://huggingface.co/models
hub = {
    "HF_MODEL_ID": "meta-llama/Meta-Llama-3.1-8B",
    "HF_NUM_CORES": "2",
    "HF_AUTO_CAST_TYPE": "fp16",
    "MAX_BATCH_SIZE": "8",
    "MAX_INPUT_LENGTH": "3686",
    "MAX_TOTAL_TOKENS": "4096",
    "HF_TOKEN": "<REPLACE WITH YOUR TOKEN>",
}

assert hub["HF_TOKEN"] != "<REPLACE WITH YOUR TOKEN>", "Please replace '<REPLACE WITH YOUR TOKEN>' with your Hugging Face Hub API token"


# create Hugging Face Model Class
huggingface_model = HuggingFaceModel(
    image_uri=get_huggingface_llm_image_uri("huggingface-neuronx", version="0.0.23"),
    env=hub,
    role=role,
)

# deploy model to SageMaker Inference
predictor = huggingface_model.deploy(
    initial_instance_count=1,
    instance_type="ml.inf2.xlarge",
    container_startup_health_check_timeout=1800,
    volume_size=512,
)

# send request
predictor.predict(
    {
        "inputs": "What is is the capital of France?",
        "parameters": {
            "do_sample": True,
            "max_new_tokens": 128,
            "temperature": 0.7,
            "top_k": 50,
            "top_p": 0.95,
        }
    }
)

Additionally, if you want to use vLLM to deploy the models, you can refer to the continuous batching guide to create the environment. After you create the environment, you can use vLLM to deploy Llama 3.1 8/70B models on AWS Trainium or Inferentia. The following an example to deploy Llama 3.1 8B:

from vllm import LLM, SamplingParams
# Sample prompts.
prompts = [
    "Hello, my name is",
    "The president of the United States is",
    "The capital of France is",
    "The future of AI is",
]
# Create a sampling params object.
sampling_params = SamplingParams(temperature=0.8, top_p=0.95)
# Create an LLM.
llm = LLM(
    model="meta-llama/Meta-Llama-3.1-8B",
    max_num_seqs=8,
    # The max_model_len and block_size arguments are required to be same as max sequence length,
    # when targeting neuron device. Currently, this is a known limitation in continuous batching
    # support in transformers-neuronx.
    max_model_len=128,
    block_size=128,
    # The device can be automatically detected when AWS Neuron SDK is installed.
    # The device argument can be either unspecified for automated detection, or explicitly assigned.
    device="neuron",
    tensor_parallel_size=8)
# Generate texts from the prompts. The output is a list of RequestOutput objects
# that contain the prompt, generated text, and other information.
outputs = llm.generate(prompts, sampling_params)
# Print the outputs.
for output in outputs:
    prompt = output.prompt
    generated_text = output.outputs[0].text
    print(f"Prompt: {prompt!r}, Generated text: {generated_text!r}")

Conclusion

AWS Trainium and Inferentia deliver high performance and low cost for fine-tuning and deploying Llama 3.1 models. We are excited to see how you will use these powerful models and our purpose-built AI infrastructure to build differentiated AI applications. To learn more about how to get started with AWS AI chips, refer to Model Samples and Tutorials in AWS Neuron Documentation.

About the Authors

John Gray is a Sr. Solutions Architect in Annapurna Labs, AWS, based out of Seattle. In this role, John works with customers on their AI and machine learning use cases, architects solutions to cost-effectively solve their business problems, and helps them build a scalable prototype using AWS AI chips.

Pinak Panigrahi works with customers to build ML-driven solutions to solve strategic business problems on AWS. In his current role, he works on optimizing training and inference of generative AI models on AWS AI chips.

Kamran Khan, Head of Business Development for AWS Inferentina/Trianium at AWS. He has over a decade of experience helping customers deploy and optimize deep learning training and inference workloads using AWS Inferentia and AWS Trainium.

Shruti Koparkar is a Senior Product Marketing Manager at AWS. She helps customers explore, evaluate, and adopt Amazon EC2 accelerated computing infrastructure for their machine learning needs.

Read More

Today, we are excited to announce the availability of the Llama 3.1 405B model on Amazon SageMaker JumpStart, and Amazon Bedrock in preview. The Llama 3.1 models are a collection of state-of-the-art pre-trained and instruct fine-tuned generative artificial intelligence (AI) models in 8B, 70B, and 405B sizes. Amazon SageMaker JumpStart is a machine learning (ML) hub that provides access to algorithms, models, and ML solutions so you can quickly get started with ML. Amazon Bedrock offers a straightforward way to build and scale generative AI applications with Meta Llama models, using a single API.

In this post, we show how to use Llama 3.1 405B to generate data (labels for a sample dataset), and how to use the generated data to fine-tune a smaller model like Llama 3 8B to generate better responses compared to the non-fine-tuned model.

Overview of Llama 3.1 405B

The Llama 3.1 collection of multilingual large language models (LLMs) is a collection of pre-trained and instruction tuned generative models in 8B, 70B, and 405B sizes (text in/text out). All models support long context length (128,000) and are optimized for inference with support for grouped query attention (GQA). The Llama 3.1 instruction tuned text-only models (8B, 70B, 405B) are optimized for multilingual dialogue use cases and outperform many of the publicly available chat models on common industry benchmarks.

Llama 3.1 405B is the first publicly available model that rivals the top models in AI when it comes to state-of-the-art capabilities in general knowledge, steerability, math, tool use, and multilingual translation. There are some unique ways to use it—in addition to direct inference, you can use the Llama 3.1 405B model to generate synthetic data to improve smaller models, and it can be a powerful domain-specific model by acting as the base model for domain-specific fine-tuning.

Llama 3.1 models are available today for inferencing on SageMaker JumpStart and Amazon Bedrock. On SageMaker JumpStart, they are rolling out to all AWS Regions where SageMaker JumpStart is available and support the required instance types. Llama 3.1 405B will require P5 instances on Amazon SageMaker. The Llama 3.1 models are also available today in the us-west-2 Region on Amazon Bedrock, with planned future expanded Regional availability.

Prerequisites

The following prerequisites are needed to implement the steps outlined in this post:

• An AWS account that will contain all your AWS resources.
• An AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) role to access SageMaker and Amazon Bedrock. For more information, refer to Identity and Access Management for Amazon SageMaker and Identity and access management for Amazon Bedrock.
• Access to Amazon SageMaker Studio or a SageMaker notebook instance or an interactive development environment (IDE) such as PyCharm or Visual Studio Code.

Responses from the Llama 3 8B Instruct model

Firstly, we perform inference with the Llama 3 8B model either directly through Amazon Bedrock or a deployed endpoint using SageMaker JumpStart. With Llama 3 Instruct models, which are optimized for dialogue use cases, the input to the model endpoints is the previous history between the chat assistant and the user. We can ask context-aware questions to conversations that have happened so far, using specific formatting for the input text (described in our earlier Llama 3B release posts, Meta Llama 3 models are now available in Amazon Bedrock and Meta Llama 3 models are now available in Amazon SageMaker JumpStart).

In the following example, the user has a conversation with the assistant about tourist sites in Paris. The assistant generated four different recommendation options, and then the user inquires about the first option:

Input: <|begin_of_text|><|start_header_id|>user<|end_header_id|>nnI am going to Paris, what should I see?<|eot_id|><|start_header_id|>assistant<|end_header_id|>nnParis, the capital of France, is known for its stunning architecture, art museums, historical landmarks, and romantic atmosphere. Here are some of the top attractions to see in Paris:nn1. The Eiffel Tower: The iconic Eiffel Tower is one of the most recognizable landmarks in the world and offers breathtaking views of the city.n2. The Louvre Museum: The Louvre is one of the world's largest and most famous museums, housing an impressive collection of art and artifacts, including the Mona Lisa.n3. Notre-Dame Cathedral: This beautiful cathedral is one of the most famous landmarks in Paris and is known for its Gothic architecture and stunning stained glass windows.nnThese are just a few of the many attractions that Paris has to offer. With so much to see and do, it's no wonder that Paris is one of the most popular tourist destinations in the world.<|eot_id|><|start_header_id|>user<|end_header_id|>nnWhat is so great about #1?<|eot_id|><|start_header_id|>assistant<|end_header_id|>nn

Output: The Eiffel Tower! It's an iconic symbol of Paris and one of the most recognizable landmarks in the world. Here are some reasons why it's so great:nn1. **Engineering marvel**: When it was built for the 1889 World's Fair, the Eiffel Tower was a groundbreaking feat of engineering. It was the tallest structure in the world at the time, standing at 324 meters (1,063 feet).n2. **Panoramic views**: The Eiffel Tower offers breathtaking 360-degree views of the city from its observation decks. You can see many of Paris' famous landmarks, such as the Seine River, the Louvre, and Montmartre.n3. **Romantic atmosphere**: The Eiffel Tower is often associated with romance and is a popular spot for proposals, weddings, and romantic dinners. The tower's iron latticework and twinkling lights at night add to its romantic ambiance.n4. **Historical significance**: The Eiffel Tower has played a significant role in French history, serving as a communication tower during World War I and a symbol of French culture and engineering.n5. **Accessibility**: The Eiffel Tower is easily accessible by public transportation or on foot, and there are various ways to experience it, including taking the stairs, elevator, or a guided tour.n6. **Nighttime spectacle**: The Eiffel Tower is even more magical at night, when it's illuminated with thousands of twinkling lights. The light show, known as the "Eiffel Tower Sparkle," takes place every hour on the hour from dusk to midnight.n7. **Iconic status**: The Eiffel Tower has been featured in countless films, literature, and art, making it an instantly recognizable symbol of Paris and France.nnOverall, the Eiffel Tower is a must-visit attraction in Paris, offering a unique combination of history, engineering, romance, and stunning views.

The Llama 3 8B model is able to generate answers for the questions without issues.

Next, let’s test the ability of Llama 3 8B to answer logical and arithmetic questions (derived from Hugging Face’s AQUA-RAT dataset—instead of multiple choice options, we ask for full answers) as follows:

Input:
<|begin_of_text|><|start_header_id|>user<|end_header_id|>
A board 7ft. 9 inches long is divided into 3 equal parts .
What is the length of each part??<|eot_id|>
<|start_header_id|>assistant<|end_header_id|>

Output:
A nice simple problem!Let's convert the length of the board to inches:
7 ft 9 inches = 95 inches (since 1 foot = 12 inches).Since the board is
divided into 3 equal parts, each part will have the same length.
To find the length of each part, we'll divide the total length (95 inches)
by 3:95 inches ÷ 3 = 31.67 inches
So each part of the board is approximately 31.67 inches long.

This answer looks almost correct but not quite. The correct answer is 31 inches long. Similar logical questions are not answered correctly by the Llama 3 8B model.

In order for the Llama 3 8B model to improve its logical question answering capability, we want to fine-tune the model with data from the AQUA-RAT dataset. As we already mentioned, the AQUA-RAT dataset contains multiple choice options for the LLM to choose from. Because we don’t have the full answers for this dataset, we use the Llama 3.1 405B model to generate the verbal answer to the questions, and use that dataset to fine-tune the Llama 3 8B model.

Generate label data using Llama 3.1 405B

Because Llama 3.1 405B is the most capable of the Llama 3.1 collection of models, and because of its state-of-the-art math and general knowledge capabilities, we run direct inference of the questions in the AQUA-RAT dataset on Llama 3.1 405B using either SageMaker JumpStart or Amazon Bedrock. This helps us generate the answers we want to use to fine-tune the smaller Llama 3 8B models. In essence, we’re using Llama 3.1 405B as an alternative to human annotation to generate labels for the dataset. The following are example inference outputs from the 405B model:

Input:
<|begin_of_text|><|start_header_id|>user<|end_header_id|>
A board 7ft. 9 inches long is divided into 3 equal parts .
What is the length of each part??<|eot_id|>
<|start_header_id|>assistant<|end_header_id|>

Output:
A nice simple problem!Let's break it down:The board is 7ft 9in long.
We can convert this to inches only:7ft = 7 × 12 = 84in (since there are
12 inches in a foot) Add the 9 inches: 84in + 9in = 93in
Now, the board is divided into 3 equal parts, so we need to divide the
total length (93in) by 3:93in ÷ 3 = 31inSo, each part is 31 inches long.

We can clearly see that the 405B answer is logically and mathematically correct, and we can use this answer in the place of human annotation for fine-tuning purposes. We concatenate the answers from the 405B model for approximately 2,000 questions from the AQUA-RAT dataset, which becomes our training dataset. Our test dataset comes from extracted answers for approximately 4,000 more questions.

The training data is constructed as a JSON object as follows:

{"instruction": "The entrance fee for a fair is $5 for persons under the age of 18, and 20% more for persons older. Each ride at the fair costs $0.50. If Joe goes with her 6 years old twin brothers, and they each took 3 rides in total. How much money does Joe end up spending at the fair?", "response": "The entrance fee for the 2 brothers is 5 x 2 = 10 dollars. The entrance fee for Joe is 5 x 1.2 = 6 dollars. So the total entrance fee is 10 + 6 = 16 dollars. The cost of the rides is 3 x 0.5 x 3 = 4.5 dollars. So the total cost is 16 + 4.5 = 20.5 dollars. The answer is 20.5."}

{"instruction": "John found that the average of 15 numbers is 40. If 10 is added to each number then the mean of number is?", "response": "The average of 15 numbers is 40. So the sum of the 15 numbers is 15 x 40 = 600. If 10 is added to each number, then the sum becomes 600 + 15 x 10 = 600 + 150 = 750. The average of the new numbers is 750 / 15 = 50.n#### 50"}

{"instruction": "A person is traveling at 20 km/hr and reached his destiny in 2.5 hr then find the distance?", "response": "A simple problem!nnLet's use the formula:nnDistance = Speed u00d7 TimennGiven:nSpeed (v) = 20 km/hrnTime (t) = 2.5 hrnnPlugging in the values, we get:nnDistance = 20 km/hr u00d7 2.5 hrn= 50 kmnnSo, the person traveled a distance of 50 km."}

The instruction and response dataset are then used to fine-tune the Llama 3 8B model in SageMaker JumpStart.

Fine-tune the Llama 3 8B model with the generated labels

For instructions on fine-tuning this model, refer to Fine-tune Code Llama on Amazon SageMaker JumpStart. We used a g5.12xlarge instance using the instruction fine-tuning option for five epochs, and observed that the loss function showed improvement both on the training and test sets.

When the fine-tuning was complete, we deployed the fine-tuned model for inference using SageMaker JumpStart on a g5.12xlarge instance (you can deploy on any other supported instance based on your throughput and latency requirements). Please refer to Meta’s End User License Agreement (EULA) for requirements when using synthetic-fine-tuned models for any use case.

Then we performed inference on another 1,000 unseen queries from the AQUA-RAT dataset. The following table shows a few of the queries for comparison.

We can qualitatively see that the answers for the math problems and logical questions are improved after fine-tuning the model. We will perform additional quantitative metric evaluation in future posts. This exercise demonstrates how you can use the Llama 3.1 405B model to efficiently generate datasets in an accelerated fashion and then use those datasets to significantly improve the task-specific capabilities of smaller models.

Conclusion

In this post, we showed how you can use the new Llama 3.1 405B model to synthesize and generate data labels to improve the performance of a much smaller model (Llama 3 8B in this case). We also showed that the responses generated by the fine-tuned model are much improved compared to the model without fine-tuning. We also provided the code notebook that you can use to run and test the solution.

As a next step, we encourage you to use this idea along with the Llama-3.1 405B model in your use case to generate labels or even unlabeled data that can then be used by a smaller model downstream to help solve your use case.

About the Authors

Sebastian Bustillo is an Enterprise Solutions Architect at AWS. He focuses on AI/ML technologies with a profound passion for generative AI and compute accelerators. At AWS, he helps customers unlock business value through cloud technologies and AI/ML. When he’s not at work, he enjoys brewing a perfect cup of specialty coffee and riding his MTB.

Dr. Farooq Sabir is a Senior Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Specialist Solutions Architect at AWS. He holds PhD and MS degrees in Electrical Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin and an MS in Computer Science from Georgia Institute of Technology. He has over 15 years of work experience and also likes to teach and mentor college students. At AWS, he helps customers formulate and solve their business problems in data science, machine learning, computer vision, artificial intelligence, numerical optimization, and related domains. Based in Dallas, Texas, he and his family love to travel and go on long road trips.

Dr. Natarajan Chennimalai Kumar is a Principal Solutions Architect in the 3rd Party Model Provider team at AWS, working closely with the Llama partner engineering team at Meta to enable AWS customers use Meta’s Llama models. He holds a PhD from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is based in the Bay Area in California. Outside of work, he enjoys watching shows with his kids, playing tennis, and traveling with his family.

Madhur Prashant is an AI and ML Solutions Architect at Amazon Web Services. He is passionate about the intersection of human thinking and generative AI. His interests lie in generative AI, specifically building solutions that are helpful and harmless, and most of all optimal for customers. Outside of work, he loves doing yoga, writing blogs, hiking, spending time with his twin, and playing the guitar.

Dr. Nikita Ivkin is a Senior Applied Scientist for Amazon SageMaker. He focuses on inference acceleration for foundation models and scalable ML algorithms in general. His research interests are in the area of inference acceleration, streaming algorithms, and federated learning, with publishing in a variety of machine learning and computer science venues such as NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, STOC, PODS, and others.

Supriya Puragundla is a Senior Solutions Architect at AWS. She has over 15 years of IT experience in software development, design, and architecture. She helps key customer accounts on their data, generative AI, and AI/ML journeys. She is passionate about data-driven AI and the area of depth in ML and generative AI.

Dr. Xin Huang is a Senior Applied Scientist for Amazon SageMaker JumpStart and Amazon SageMaker built-in algorithms. He focuses on developing scalable machine learning algorithms. His research interests are in the area of natural language processing, explainable deep learning on tabular data, and robust analysis of non-parametric space-time clustering. He has published many papers in ACL, ICDM, and KDD conferences, and Royal Statistical Society: Series A.

Dr. Ashish Khetan is a Senior Applied Scientist with Amazon SageMaker JumpStart and helps develop machine learning algorithms. He got his PhD from University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He is an active researcher in machine learning and statistical inference, and has published many papers in NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, JMLR, ACL, and EMNLP conferences.

Karl Albertsen leads the product management and partnership teams for Amazon SageMaker. He is focused on making AI accessible, cost-effective, and high-performing for business applications.

Christopher Whitten is an SDE with the SageMaker JumpStart team leading model onboarding and deeper integration with SageMaker services. Chris is passionate about accelerating the ubiquity of AI in practical business applications. His technical interests include agentic workflows and MLOps.

Hemant Singh is an Applied Scientist with experience in Amazon SageMaker JumpStart. He got his master’s from Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences and B.Tech from IIT Delhi. He has experience in working on a diverse range of machine learning problems within the domain of natural language processing, computer vision, and time series analysis.

Evan Kravitz is a software engineer at Amazon Web Services, working on SageMaker JumpStart. He is interested in the confluence of machine learning with cloud computing. Evan received his undergraduate degree from Cornell University and master’s degree from the University of California, Berkeley. In 2021, he presented a paper on adversarial neural networks at the ICLR conference. In his free time, Evan enjoys cooking, traveling, and going on runs in New York City.

Read More

Today, we are excited to announce that the state-of-the-art Llama 3.1 collection of multilingual large language models (LLMs), which includes pre-trained and instruction tuned generative AI models in 8B, 70B, and 405B sizes, is available through Amazon SageMaker JumpStart to deploy for inference. Llama is a publicly accessible LLM designed for developers, researchers, and businesses to build, experiment, and responsibly scale their generative artificial intelligence (AI) ideas. In this post, we walk through how to discover and deploy Llama 3.1 models using SageMaker JumpStart.

Overview of Llama 3.1

The Llama 3.1 multilingual LLMs are a collection of pre-trained and instruction tuned generative models in 8B, 70B, and 405B sizes (text in/text and code out). All models support long context length (128,000) and are optimized for inference with support for grouped query attention (GQA). The Llama 3.1 instruction tuned text-only models (8B, 70B, 405B) are optimized for multilingual dialogue use cases and outperform many of the publicly available chat models on common industry benchmarks.

At its core, Llama 3.1 is an auto-regressive language model that uses an optimized transformer architecture. The tuned versions use supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF) to align with human preferences for helpfulness and safety. Architecturally, the core LLM for Llama 3 and Llama 3.1 is the same dense architecture.

Llama 3.1 also offers instruct variants, and the instruct model is fine-tuned for tool use. The model has been trained to generate calls for a few specific tools for capabilities like search, image generation, code execution, and mathematical reasoning. In addition, the model supports zero-shot tool use.

The responsible use guide from Meta can assist you in performing additional fine-tuning that may be necessary to customize and optimize the models with appropriate safety mitigations.

Overview of SageMaker JumpStart

SageMaker JumpStart offers access to a broad selection of publicly available foundation models (FMs). These pre-trained models serve as powerful starting points that can be deeply customized to address specific use cases. You can now use state-of-the-art model architectures, such as language models, computer vision models, and more, without having to build them from scratch.

With SageMaker JumpStart, you can deploy models in a secure environment. The models are provisioned on dedicated SageMaker Inference instances, including AWS Trainium and AWS Inferentia powered instances, and are isolated within your virtual private cloud (VPC). This enforces data security and compliance, because the models operate under your own VPC controls, rather than in a shared public environment. After deploying an FM, you can further customize and fine-tune it using the extensive capabilities of Amazon SageMaker, including SageMaker Inference for deploying models and container logs for improved observability. With SageMaker, you can streamline the entire model deployment process.

Discover Llama 3.1 models in SageMaker JumpStart

SageMaker JumpStart provides FMs through two primary interfaces: Amazon SageMaker Studio and the SageMaker Python SDK. This provides multiple options to discover and use hundreds of models for your specific use case.

SageMaker Studio is a comprehensive integrated development environment (IDE) that offers a unified, web-based interface for performing all aspects of the machine learning (ML) development lifecycle. From preparing data to building, training, and deploying models, SageMaker Studio provides purpose-built tools to streamline the entire process. In SageMaker Studio, you can access SageMaker JumpStart to discover and explore the extensive catalog of FMs available for deployment to inference capabilities on SageMaker Inference.

Alternatively, you can use the SageMaker Python SDK to programmatically access and utilize SageMaker JumpStart models. This approach allows for greater flexibility and integration with existing AI and ML workflows and pipelines. By providing multiple access points, SageMaker JumpStart helps you seamlessly incorporate pre-trained models into your AI and ML development efforts, regardless of your preferred interface or workflow.

Deploy Llama 3.1 models for inference using SageMaker JumpStart

On the SageMaker JumpStart landing page, you can browse for solutions, models, notebooks, and other resources. You can find the Llama 3.1 models in the Foundation Models: Text Generation carousel.

If you don’t see the Llama 3.1 models, update your SageMaker Studio version by shutting down and restarting. For more information about version updates, refer to Shut down and Update Studio Classic Apps.

The following table lists the Llama 3.1 models you can access in SageMaker JumpStart.

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

When you choose either button, a pop-up window will show the End-User License Agreement (EULA) and acceptable use policy for you to accept.

Upon acceptance, you will proceed to the next step to use the model.

Deploy Llama 3.1 models for inference using the Python SDK

When you choose Deploy and accept the terms, model deployment will start. Alternatively, you can deploy through the example notebook by choosing Open Notebook. The notebook provides end-to-end guidance on how to deploy the model for inference and clean up resources.

To deploy using a notebook, you start by selecting an appropriate model, specified by the model_id. You can deploy any of the selected models on SageMaker.

You can deploy a Llama 3.1 405B model in FP8 using SageMaker JumpStart with the following SageMaker Python SDK code:

from sagemaker.jumpstart.model import JumpStartModel

model = JumpStartModel(model_id = "meta-llama-3-1-405b-fp8")
predictor = model.deploy(accept_eula=accept_eula)

This deploys the model on SageMaker with default configurations, including default instance type and default VPC configurations. You can change these configurations by specifying non-default values in JumpStartModel. To successfully deploy the model, you must manually set accept_eula=True as a deploy method argument. After it’s deployed, you can run inference against the deployed endpoint through the SageMaker predictor:

payload = {
    "inputs": "The color of the sky is blue but sometimes it can also be ",
    "parameters": {"max_new_tokens":256, "top_p":0.9, "temperature":0.6}
}
response = predictor.predict(payload)

The following table lists all the Llama models available in SageMaker JumpStart along with the model_ids, default instance types, and the maximum number of total tokens (sum of number of input tokens and number of generated tokens) supported for each of these models. For increased context length, customers can modify the default instance type in the SageMaker JumpStart UI.

Inference and example prompts for Llama-3.1-405B-Instruct

You can use Llama models for text completion for any piece of text. Through text generation, you can perform a variety of tasks, such as question answering, language translation, sentiment analysis, and more. Input payload to the endpoint looks like the following code:

<|begin_of_text|><|start_header_id|>[ROLE_1]<|end_header_id|>

[ROLE_1_MESSAGE]<|eot_id|><|begin_of_text|><|start_header_id|>[ROLE_2]<|end_header_id|>

[ROLE_2_MESSAGE]<|eot_id|><|begin_of_text|><|start_header_id|>[ROLE_3]<|end_header_id|>

...

The roles should alternate between user and assistant while optionally starting with a system role.

In the next example, we show how to use Llama Instruct models within a conversational context, where a multi-turn chat is occurring between a user and an assistant. The first few rounds of the conversation are provided as input to the model:

<|begin_of_text|><|start_header_id|>user<|end_header_id|>

I am going to Paris, what should I see?<|eot_id|><|start_header_id|>assistant<|end_header_id|>

Paris, the capital of France, is known for its stunning architecture, art museums, historical landmarks, and romantic atmosphere. Here are some of the top attractions to see in Paris: 1. The Eiffel Tower: The iconic Eiffel Tower is one of the most recognizable landmarks in the world and offers breathtaking views of the city. 2. The Louvre Museum: The Louvre is one of the world's largest and most famous museums, housing an impressive collection of art and artifacts, including the Mona Lisa. 3. Notre-Dame Cathedral: This beautiful cathedral is one of the most famous landmarks in Paris and is known for its Gothic architecture and stunning stained glass windows. These are just a few of the many attractions that Paris has to offer. With so much to see and do, it's no wonder that Paris is one of the most popular tourist destinations in the world.<|eot_id|><|start_header_id|>user<|end_header_id|> What is so great about #1?<|eot_id|><|start_header_id|>assistant<|end_header_id|>

This produces the following response:

The Eiffel Tower! It's an iconic symbol of Paris and one of the most recognizable landmarks in the world. Here are some reasons why it's so great:

1. **Engineering marvel**: When it was built for the 1889 World's Fair, the Eiffel Tower was a groundbreaking feat of engineering. It was the tallest structure in the world at the time, standing at 324 meters (1,063 feet).
2. **Breathtaking views**: The Eiffel Tower offers stunning views of the city from its observation decks. On a clear day, you can see for miles in every direction, taking in the beautiful Parisian landscape.
3. **Romantic atmosphere**: The Eiffel Tower is often associated with romance and love. It's a popular spot for proposals, weddings, and romantic getaways.
4. **Historical significance**: The Eiffel Tower has played a significant role in history, serving as a communication tower during World War I and a symbol of French resistance during World War II.
5. **Iconic design**: The Eiffel Tower's lattice-like design is instantly recognizable and has been imitated and parodied countless times in art, architecture, and popular culture.

Llama Guard

You can also use the Llama Guard model to help add guardrails for these models. Llama Guard provides input and output guardrails for LLM deployments. Llama Guard is a publicly available model that performs competitively on common open benchmarks and provides developers with a pre-trained model to help defend against generating potentially risky outputs. This model has been trained on a mix of publicly available datasets to enable detection of common types of potentially risky or violating content that may be relevant to a number of developer use cases.

You can use Llama Guard as a supplemental tool for developers to integrate into their own mitigation strategies, such as for chatbots, content moderation, customer service, social media monitoring, and education. By passing user-generated content through Llama Guard before publishing or responding to it, developers can flag unsafe or inappropriate language and take action to maintain a safe and respectful environment. Llama Guard is available on SageMaker JumpStart.

Conclusion

In this post, we explored how SageMaker JumpStart empowers data scientists and ML engineers to discover, access, and run a wide range of pre-trained FMs for inference, including Meta’s most advanced and capable models to date. Llama 3.1 models are available today in SageMaker JumpStart initially in the US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), and US West (Oregon) AWS Regions. Get started with SageMaker JumpStart and Llama 3.1 models today.

Resources

For additional resources, refer to the following:

• SageMaker JumpStart model catalog
• Reduce model deployment costs by 50% on average using the latest features of Amazon SageMaker
• Train, deploy, and evaluate pretrained models with SageMaker JumpStart

About the Authors

Saurabh Trikande is a Senior Product Manager for Amazon SageMaker Inference. He is passionate about working with customers and is motivated by the goal of democratizing machine learning. He focuses on core challenges related to deploying complex ML applications, multi-tenant ML models, cost optimizations, and making deployment of deep learning models more accessible. In his spare time, Saurabh enjoys hiking, learning about innovative technologies, following TechCrunch, and spending time with his family.

James Park is a Solutions Architect at Amazon Web Services. He works with Amazon.com to design, build, and deploy technology solutions on AWS, and has a particular interest in AI and machine learning. In his spare time he enjoys seeking out new cultures, new experiences, and staying up to date with the latest technology trends.You can find him on LinkedIn.

Dr. Kyle Ulrich is an Applied Scientist with the Amazon SageMaker built-in algorithms team. His research interests include scalable machine learning algorithms, computer vision, time series, Bayesian non-parametrics, and Gaussian processes. His PhD is from Duke University and he has published papers in NeurIPS, Cell, and Neuron.

Jonathan Guinegagne is a Senior Software Engineer with Amazon SageMaker JumpStart at AWS. He got his master’s degree from Columbia University. His interests span machine learning, distributed systems, and cloud computing, as well as democratizing the use of AI. Jonathan is originally from France and now lives in Brooklyn, NY.

Christopher Whitten is a software developer on the JumpStart team. He helps scale model selection and integrate models with other SageMaker services. Chris is passionate about accelerating the ubiquity of AI across a variety of business domains.

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