Amazon Web Services MLA-C01 - AWS Certified Machine Learning Engineer - Associate

Change the number of samples used in each iteration of training

Correct selection:

Change the batch size

Why:

Increasing the batch size reduces the number of iterations per epoch, which can significantly shorten training time while maintaining model quality when tuned appropriately. AWS explicitly recommends batch size tuning as a primary performance optimization.

Increase the number of instances used during training

Correct selection:

Use the SageMaker AI distributed data parallelism (SMDDP) library

Why:

SMDDP is designed to efficiently distribute training data across multiple GPU instances with optimized gradient synchronization. This accelerates training without affecting model convergence or accuracy, unlike naive scaling approaches.

Stop training before the maximum number of epochs are reached if performance is sufficient and not improving

Correct selection:

Use early stopping on the training job

Why:

Early stopping automatically terminates training when validation metrics stop improving. AWS recommends this to reduce wasted compute time while preserving optimal model performance.

Logging the metrics to Amazon CloudWatch allows the metrics to be tracked and monitored effectively.

CloudWatch Alarms can be configured to trigger when metrics breach a predefined threshold.

The alarm can be set to notify through Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS), which can send email messages to the configured recipients.

This is the standard and most efficient way to achieve the desired functionality.

Amazon SageMaker AI shadow testing enables ML engineers to evaluate new model versions by sending a copy of live production traffic to a shadow variant without affecting production inference responses. AWS documentation specifies that shadow variants are configured separately from production variants and can use different instance types, including higher-performance GPU instances.

The correct approach is to create a new endpoint configuration using the CreateEndpointConfig API. This configuration includes the existing production variant and a separate ShadowProductionVariants list. The shadow variant can be assigned a larger instance type to meet GPU performance requirements while leaving the production variant unchanged. After creating the configuration, the engineer deploys it using the CreateEndpoint action.

Option A is incorrect because production variant configurations cannot be directly modified to include shadow variants. Option B is incorrect because shadow variants are not defined as standard production variants; defining two production variants would route traffic differently and could affect production behavior. Option C introduces unnecessary complexity and deviates from SageMaker’s built-in shadow testing functionality.

AWS explicitly documents that shadow variants are designed to isolate testing resources, support different instance types, and ensure zero impact on production inference. Therefore, Option D is the correct and AWS-recommended solution.

Amazon SageMaker automatically tracks the Invocations metric, which represents the number of API calls made to the endpoint, in Amazon CloudWatch. By adding this metric to a CloudWatch dashboard, you can monitor the endpoint's activity in real-time. Setting up a CloudWatch alarm allows the system to send notifications whenever the API call events exceed the defined threshold, meeting both the monitoring and notification requirements efficiently.

The requirement is event-driven automation when new data arrives in Amazon S3, followed by training and model registration. Amazon EventBridge natively supports S3 object creation events and can trigger downstream workflows immediately.

By using EventBridge to start an AWS Step Functions workflow that includes a training step and a SageMaker Model Registry registration step, the pipeline runs automatically as soon as new data is uploaded—well within the 24-hour requirement.

Option A introduces unnecessary polling and delay. Option B is time-based and does not ensure alignment with data readiness. Option C is invalid because S3 Lifecycle rules manage object transitions, not workflow execution.

Therefore, EventBridge-triggered Step Functions is the correct solution.

This scenario clearly describes an overfitting problem. The neural network performs well on training data but fails to generalize to evaluation data. According to AWS Machine Learning and deep learning best practices, overfitting occurs when a model learns noise or overly specific patterns in the training data instead of generalizable relationships.

L1 and L2 regularization are well-established techniques to combat overfitting. They work by penalizing large weight values during optimization, effectively constraining the model’s complexity. L1 regularization encourages sparsity, while L2 regularization (weight decay) smooths the weight distribution. AWS documentation recommends regularization as a primary method for improving generalization when a model shows a large gap between training and evaluation performance.

Option B is incorrect because removing dropout layers would increase overfitting, not reduce it. Dropout is itself a regularization technique.

Option C would likely worsen overfitting, as training for more epochs allows the model to memorize the training data even further.

Option D increases model complexity, which again exacerbates overfitting rather than resolving it.

Therefore, penalizing large weights using L1 or L2 regularization is the correct solution.

For real-time video content moderation with minimal operational overhead, AWS documentation recommends using fully managed, purpose-built AI services. Amazon Rekognition provides real-time video analysis capabilities, including content moderation, unsafe content detection, and label recognition for live video streams.

By integrating Rekognition with AWS Lambda, the company can automatically process video frames, extract moderation metadata, and take immediate action (such as flagging or stopping a stream) without managing servers, models, or infrastructure. This serverless architecture scales automatically and minimizes operational complexity.

Option B introduces unnecessary complexity. While Amazon Bedrock LLMs are powerful, they are not required for image-based moderation tasks that Rekognition already handles natively.

Option C is incorrect because using Amazon SageMaker would require model training, endpoint management, and scaling, significantly increasing operational overhead.

Option D is incorrect because Amazon Transcribe and Amazon Comprehend are designed for audio and text analysis, not image or video frame moderation.

Therefore, Amazon Rekognition with AWS Lambda is the most efficient, scalable, and low-maintenance solution for real-time video moderation during live streaming events.

For near real-time anomaly detection on streaming IoT data, AWS recommends Amazon Managed Service for Apache Flink. Flink is designed for stateful, low-latency stream processing and is well suited for time-series sensor analytics.

A key requirement is application resilience during deployments. Managed Flink supports system rollback, which automatically reverts to the last stable application version if a new deployment fails. This capability ensures uninterrupted processing even if application bugs are introduced, meeting the company’s reliability requirement.

Manual rollback (Option B) introduces operational risk and delays. Amazon Data Firehose (Options C and D) is a delivery service and does not support complex anomaly detection logic or application version rollback.

Therefore, using Managed Flink with system rollback enabled is the correct solution.

Amazon SageMaker Pipelines provides native orchestration of ML workflows with fine-grained control, DAG-based visualization, and seamless integration with SageMaker Studio. AWS documentation explicitly states that Pipelines is designed for end-to-end ML workflow automation and visualization.

SageMaker ML Lineage Tracking records relationships between datasets, models, training jobs, and endpoints, enabling full auditability and governance, which is essential for compliance.

SageMaker Experiments tracks experiment metrics but does not provide lineage-level governance. CodePipeline is a general CI/CD service and lacks ML-specific DAG visualization and lineage tracking.

AWS best practices recommend combining SageMaker Pipelines + SageMaker Studio + ML Lineage Tracking for enterprise-grade ML workflow management.

Therefore, Option C is the correct and AWS-verified solution.

This scenario describes a severely imbalanced classification problem. In such cases, accuracy is a misleading metric, because the model can achieve high accuracy by predicting only the majority class.

AWS ML best practices recommend using F1 score (or precision/recall) when evaluating imbalanced datasets. The F1 score balances false positives and false negatives, making it ideal for assessing minority-class performance.

For image data, image augmentation (rotations, flips, crops, color jitter) is the preferred technique to increase minority-class representation. SMOTE is designed for tabular data and is not suitable for image pixel data.

Therefore, the correct solution is to optimize for F1 score and apply image augmentation.

Thus, Option B is the correct and AWS-aligned answer.