Morris Alper

I am a PhD student at the School of Electrical Engineering, Tel Aviv University (TAU). Under the mentorship of Dr. Hadar Averbuch-Elor, I am researching multimodal learning – machine learning applied to tasks involving vision and language.

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 / GitHub / LinkedIn / ORCID

Publications

	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 propose to model human-human interaction understanding in images as free text generation, providing a new benchmark and showing how to use Internet image captions as weak supervision for this task.
	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 investigate the effect of vision-and-language pretraining on visual reasoning in text, finding that multimodally trained text encoders outperform unimodally trained encoders such as BERT on such tasks.

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.