Selected Work

Projects.

Experiments and systems across research, engineering, physical design, and computational creativity.

01

NLP Course Project · 2025

Evaluating Size-Based Relational Reasoning in VLMs

Rotem Gatenyo and Ofek Basson

Do vision-language models reason from what they see, or fall back on familiar real-world proportions? We built a controlled synthetic benchmark in Blender and evaluated Llama 3.2 Vision on object identification and height comparison under natural, inverted, and exaggerated size ratios.

Report
  • Dataset 10 object pairs, 3 size conditions
  • Study VLM evaluation and 32-person human study
  • Tools Blender, Python, Llama 3.2 Vision
A chair and shoe shown at natural and inverted size ratios, with correct and incorrect VLM answers
01 Research question
A controlled Blender render showing an orange larger than a refrigerator
02 Controlled render
Plots comparing taller-decision accuracy with and without object names in the prompt
03 Results analysis

Key finding: Inverting expected object-size relationships significantly reduced the model's visual height-comparison accuracy without object labels, while human participants achieved 100% accuracy across all conditions.

02

Midburn Installation · 2022

Maze Zaz — Midburn Interactive Installation

Maze Zaz was a collaborative interactive installation built for Midburn. I began the project with minimal SolidWorks experience from my undergraduate studies and no background in designing physical parts, so I taught myself the required tools and fabrication principles along the way. I translated the team's physical concept into manufacturable components, developed assembly visualizations, and prepared dimensioned drawings for CNC fabrication and manual cutting.

  • Role CAD design and fabrication planning
  • Tools SolidWorks, CNC routing, woodworking
Exploded SolidWorks assembly showing the layered wooden components
01 CAD assembly
Dimensioned SolidWorks fabrication drawing for a curved wooden component
02 Fabrication drawing
Team members cutting and sanding wooden parts in the workshop
03 Workshop
Participants using the completed Maze Zaz installation at Midburn during sunset
04 At Midburn