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.

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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.