VeUP
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Machine Learning · Multimodal ML at scale
A global consumer social platformIdentity protected

Global social platform reaches 99.6% moderation accuracy on Amazon Bedrock

Well-Architected ReviewAI safety guardrailsModel evaluationModel routingModel fallbackProvider abstractionPrompt engineeringEvent-driven architectureUnit-cost optimizationInfrastructure-as-code foundationAgentic workflowsCost-optimization deep diveHigh-risk-issue remediation roadmapTarget-state architecture design & costed POCDay-2 runbooks & team enablementInfrastructure observabilityPrivate connectivity & network isolationSecrets management & credential eliminationModel cost governanceWorkload placement & runtime selectionStorage tiering & lifecycle policies
54 → 99.58%
NSFW accuracy — prompt engineering alone, no fine-tuning
~$1
per 1,000 images, end to end
4 of 900
NSFW images missed — 99.56% recall, the number that matters when false negatives are unacceptable
Amazon BedrockAWS Step FunctionsAWS LambdaAmazon CloudWatch

Under the ML lens, the platform’s moderation engine is a production computer-vision system with the full lifecycle discipline that implies: a labeled evaluation benchmark, a head-to-head model bake-off scored on the metric that actually matters to the business, per-frame inference composed into content-level classifications, and production telemetry — latency percentiles and cost per evaluation — instrumented from day one.

The challenge

Content moderation is a classification problem with asymmetric error costs: a false negative puts unsafe content in front of users; a false positive merely queues a human review. That asymmetry dictates the whole ML program — recall is the decisive metric, and any model change must be judged against a stable labeled benchmark, not anecdotes. The platform also faced genuine model uncertainty: multimodal vision-language models were improving monthly, and the incumbent classical-CV engine’s accuracy and unit economics both needed to be beaten with evidence before production could move.

The solution

VeUP built the evaluation machinery first. A 1,501-image labeled benchmark became the standing ground truth, and Phase 1 ran a controlled head-to-head across candidate engines — multimodal foundation models on Amazon Bedrock (Qwen 3 VL, Llama 4 Maverick, Amazon Nova Premier, Claude Opus) against the classical computer-vision baseline — with every candidate scored on recall, precision behavior, latency, and cost per 1,000 evaluations. Qwen 3 VL won on the decisive metric and unit economics, and Phase 2 promoted it to the production engine with the baseline retained as a fallback. Video classification composes per-frame inference into a content-level verdict through a K-of-N aggregation rule, with AWS Step Functions pacing per-frame inference and AWS Lambda executing it. In production, Amazon CloudWatch tracks the ML program’s health as measured quantities — recall against the benchmark, P50/P95/P99 latency, and cost per evaluation — so the bake-off can be re-run and the engine re-selected as the model landscape moves.

Production outcomes

KPIResult
Classification quality99.56% NSFW recall on the 1,501-image labeled benchmark (4 misses in 900 positives), with recall chosen as the decisive selection metric to match the platform’s asymmetric error costs.
Unit economics~57% lower cost per 1,000 image evaluations versus the prior engine — the bake-off won on both quality and economics simultaneously.
Production telemetryLatency percentiles (P50/P95/P99), acceptance pass rate, and cost per evaluation instrumented in CloudWatch from go-live — the ML program’s health read as numbers, not impressions.
Lessons & continuationPick the metric before the model — asymmetric error costs make recall, not accuracy, the selection criterion; a standing labeled benchmark turns model churn into a repeatable evaluation, and per-frame-to-verdict aggregation is where video ML quality is actually won.
AWS services in production
Amazon Bedrock (Qwen 3 VL)Amazon Rekognition (baseline/fallback)AWS Step Functions (Map)AWS LambdaAmazon S3Amazon CloudWatchAWS IAM
Evaluated models
Llama 4 MaverickAmazon Nova PremierClaude Opus