Morris Alper

I am a PhD student at the School of Electrical Engineering, Tel Aviv University (TAU), supervised by Dr. Hadar Averbuch-Elor. My research interests lie on the intersection of vision, language, and three-dimensional data, informed by how humans perceive the world.

I began my PhD in March 2023; previously, I received my MSc with honors from Tel Aviv University in Computer Science and my BSc from MIT with a dual major in mathematics and linguistics. I also have experience working as a data scientist and teaching machine learning to industry professionals.

Email / CV / Scholar / Twitter / Bluesky / GitHub / LinkedIn / ORCID

Publications

	Mitigating Open-Vocabulary Caption Hallucinations Assaf Ben-Kish, Moran Yanuka, Morris Alper, Raja Giryes, Hadar Averbuch-Elor EMNLP, 2024 We propose a framework for addressing open-vocabulary hallucinations in image captioning models, including a new benchmark and a reinforcement learning-based method to reduce such hallucinations.
	Emergent Visual-Semantic Hierarchies in Image-Text Representations Morris Alper, Hadar Averbuch-Elor ECCV (Oral), 2024 We show that foundation VLMs like CLIP model visual-semantic hierarchies, proposing the Radial Embedding framework for probing and optimizing this knowledge and the HierarCaps dataset of ground-truth image caption hierarchies.
	ICC : Quantifying Image Caption Concreteness for Multimodal Dataset Curation Moran Yanuka, Morris Alper, Hadar Averbuch-Elor, Raja Giryes ACL (Findings), 2024 We quantify image caption concreteness using information loss in foundation vision-language models, and use this score to filter web-scale multimodal datasets.
	HaLo-NeRF: Learning Geometry-Guided Semantics for Exploring Unconstrained Photo Collections Chen Dudai^, Morris Alper^, Hana Bezalel, Rana Hanocka, Itai Lang, Hadar Averbuch-Elor ^Equal contribution Eurographics*, 2024 We learn a semantic localization field for textual descriptions over collections of in-the-wild images depicting a large-scale scene.
	Kiki or Bouba? Sound Symbolism in Vision-and-Language Models Morris Alper, Hadar Averbuch-Elor NeurIPS (Spotlight), 2023 Presentation from IMVC 2024 By generating images using prompts containing pseudowords (nonsense words) and analyzing their shapes, we show that AI image generation models show sound-shape associations similar to those known from human psychology.
	Learning Human-Human Interactions in Images from Weak Textual Supervision Morris Alper, Hadar Averbuch-Elor ICCV, 2023 We model human-human interaction understanding in images as free text generation, provide a new benchmark and show how to learn this with weak supervision from Internet image captions.
	Is BERT Blind? Exploring the Effect of Vision-and-Language Pretraining on Visual Language Understanding Morris Alper^, Michael Fiman^, Hadar Averbuch-Elor ^Equal contribution CVPR*, 2023 We find that multimodally trained text encoders outperform unimodally trained text encoders on visual reasoning in text.

Miscellanea

Featured in the News:

Our work on the Kiki-Bouba effect and sound symbolism in AI models was featured in the Haaretz newspaper (Hebrew language). I was also interviewed about this work on the Kan Tarbut morning radio program (recording link, 46:30-60:00, Hebrew language).

Blog Posts and Projects:

Awards and Honors:

As a high school student, I qualified to join the USA team at the International Linguistics Olympiad (IOL) for three years (2008, 2009, 2011). In particular, in 2011 I won 1st place (gold medal) on individual and team rounds in 2011 as well as receiving the Zhurinski Memorial Prize and a best solution award. I also received a silver medal (tied for 6th place) in 2008 and our team won the team round in 2009.