The "CAAI-Ant Group Research Fund (AGI Special Program)" is jointly established by CAAI and Ant Group to support industry-academia collaboration and the co-development of the AGI field. It aims to build a platform for industry-academia cooperation, connect industrial practice with academic research, and support outstanding scholars worldwide in conducting cutting-edge research that integrates with industry needs.

Centered on research, driven by talent cultivation, and aimed at win-win collaboration, the CAAI-Ant Group Research Fund encourages young scholars to deepen their expertise while helping Ant Group sustain innovation. It enables two-way empowerment between foundational theoretical breakthroughs and industrial applications.

The application covers three major research directions: AI Foundation Models, Agentic AI / AI Agents, and Token Efficiency Optimization / World Models. A total of 26 research topics are available.

Selected projects will receive funding of RMB 300,000 per project. Each project has a one-year cooperation period, with the possibility of rolling support for projects that achieve outstanding collaboration outcomes.

Direction overview: The AI Foundation Models direction focuses on multimodal unified representation, continuous evolution, and deep integration with real-world scenarios. It covers diverse applications such as financial numerical understanding, voice-to-singing conversion, vision-guided generation, OCR enhancement, UI generation, and psychological intervention. Through cross-modal alignment, structured corpus construction, ModelGrow, and long-term memory mechanisms, this direction aims to advance foundation models capable of real-time interaction, dynamic evolution, and fine-grained control, building a general-purpose intelligence substrate for complex tasks.

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