Amazon rds MySql -> concurrent connections deadlocks
The short answer is no: I can't think of a difference from MySQL defaults that would cause this.

The longer answer is that it is possible to reduce some locking with READ-COMMITTED as the isolation level + Row-based Replication. To which RDS does not support switching to Row-based Replication :(

Whether or not this reduction in locking will help you depends on your schema.  See my blog post here under "Write scalability of certain statements".