Hi, I’m Hani Alomari 👋

I'm a Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science at Virginia Tech, advised by Dr. Chris Thomas, and a recipient of the Amazon Fellowship. My research sits at the intersection of computer vision and natural language processing: I study how vision–language models understand, evaluate, and retrieve images that admit more than one valid interpretation, with the goal of building systems that judge visual content from diverse human perspectives and give interpretable, actionable feedback. I also build agents that map rooms from echoes alone, without cameras or lidar. My work has appeared at CVPR, ACL, EMNLP, ECCV, and NeurIPS.

Virginia TechPh.D. Candidate · 2023–2027

AdobeML Engineer Intern · Summer 2026 Amazon FellowshipAmazon–VT Initiative · 2026–27

JUSTM.S. & B.S. · 2016–2022

Research Interests

Cross-Modal Retrieval Visual Reasoning & Grounding Image Quality & Aesthetic Assessment Vision-Language Models Acoustic Scene Mapping

News

Oct '26Submitted papers to ICLR 2027 and ACL Rolling Review

Aug '263 papers accepted to EMNLP 2026 (Main), one receiving a SAC Highlights Award

Aug '26Received the Amazon Fellowship (Amazon–Virginia Tech Initiative, 2026–2027)

Aug '26Wrapped up my ML Engineer internship at Adobe in San Jose, working on image-quality evaluation

Jun '26Part-level visual grounding paper accepted to ECCV 2026

Jun '26Presented Lenses at CVPR 2026 in Denver, CO

Feb '26Lenses accepted to CVPR 2026

May '25MaxMatch accepted to ACL 2025 (Main)

Selected Publications

Lenses: Toward Polysemous Vision-Language Understanding

Hani Alomari, Ali Asgarov, Chris Thomas

CVPR 2026 Paper Project

Maximal Matching Matters: Preventing Representation Collapse for Robust Cross-Modal Retrieval

Hani Alomari, Anushka Sivakumar, Andrew Zhang, Chris Thomas

ACL 2025 Paper

JourneyBench: A Challenging One-Stop Vision-Language Understanding Benchmark of Generated Images

Zhecan Wang, Junzhang Liu, Chia-Wei Tang, Hani Alomari, et al.

NeurIPS 2024 · Datasets & Benchmarks Paper Website

ENTER: Event-Based Interpretable Reasoning for VideoQA

Hammad Ayyubi, Junzhang Liu, Ali Asgarov, Zaber Ibn Abdul Hakim, Najibul Haque Sarker, Zhecan Wang, Chia-Wei Tang, Hani Alomari, et al.

MAR Workshop @ NeurIPS 2024 Spotlight Paper

All publications →