Predoctoral Researcher
Allen Institute for AI

Jacob Morrison

Hi! I'm a predoctoral researcher on the AllenNLP team at Ai2, and I'm advised by Pradeep Dasigi and Jesse Dodge. I received my masters in computational linguistics and bachelors in computer science from the University of Washington, where I was advised by Noah Smith. I've previously worked on code & program synthesis at Google [x], language + vision models at Ai2, and platform health at Twitter, and I also spent a few years as a software engineer at Tableau and Google. See my CV for more details.

I'm applying to PhD programs! Feel free to reach out if you're interested in chatting. I'm interested in building broadly capable LMs, and I'll be supported by an NSF Computer Science Graduate Fellowship.

Research

My research is generally focused on making modern language models broadly useful and reliable. I've recently been focused on improving model capabilities through post-training by creating new datasets and evaluations, and improving training algorithms and model architectures. I'm also a strong supporter of open science, and I've contributed to openly released artefacts including Tulu 3, RewardBench, Dolma, and OLMo, OLMo 2, and OLMoE, with more coming soon.

I also spend a portion of my time helping policymakers understand and address the societal impacts of advances in AI. I started and currently lead Ai2's public policy efforts, through which I regularly engage with policymakers at the local, state, and federal levels. I previously served on the City of Seattle's Generative AI Policy Advisory Group, and I'm currently serving on the Education and Workforce Development Subcommittee of the Washington State AI Task Force.

Awards & Fellowships

• Aug. 2024: ACL Theme Paper Award
• Aug. 2024: ACL Best Resource Paper Award
• Aug. 2023: NSF Computer Science Graduate Fellowship

Publications

2024

• Tülu 3: Pushing Frontiers in Open Language Model Post-Training
  Nathan Lambert, Jacob Morrison, Valentina Pyatkin, Shengyi Huang, Hamish Ivison, Faeze Brahman, Lester James V. Miranda, Alisa Liu, Nouha Dziri, Shane Lyu, Yuling Gu, Saumya Malik, Victoria Graf, Jena D. Hwang, Jiangjiang Yang, Ronan Le Bras, Oyvind Tafjord, Chris Wilhelm, Luca Soldaini, Noah A. Smith, Yizhong Wang, Pradeep Dasigi, Hannaneh Hajishirzi
  arXiv paper blog
• Holistically Evaluating the Environmental Impact of Creating Language Models
  Jacob Morrison, Clara Na, Jared Fernandez, Tim Dettmers, Emma Strubell, Jesse Dodge
  under review
• OLMoE: Open Mixture-of-Experts Language Models
  Niklas Muennighoff, Luca Soldaini, Dirk Groeneveld, Kyle Lo, Jacob Morrison, Sewon Min, Weijia Shi, Pete Walsh, Oyvind Tafjord, Nathan Lambert, Yuling Gu, Shane Arora, Akshita Bhagia, Dustin Schwenk, David Wadden, Alexander Wettig, Binyuan Hui, Tim Dettmers, Douwe Kiela, Ali Farhadi, Noah A. Smith, Pang Wei Koh, Amanpreet Singh, Hannaneh Hajishirzi
  under review paper
• Merge to Learn: Efficiently Adding Skills to Language Models with Model Merging
  Jacob Morrison, Noah A. Smith, Hannaneh Hajishirzi, Pang Wei Koh, Jesse Dodge, Pradeep Dasigi
  Findings of EMNLP 2024 paper
• SciRIFF: A Resource to Enhance Language Model Instruction-Following over Scientific Literature
  David Wadden*, Kejian Shi*, Jacob Morrison, Aakanksha Naik, Shruti Singh, Nitzan Barzilay, Kyle Lo, Tom Hope, Luca Soldaini, Shannon Zejiang Shen, Doug Downey, Hannaneh Hajishirzi, Arman Cohan
  arXiv paper
• RewardBench: A Benchmark for Evaluating Reward Models
  Nathan Lambert, Valentina Piyatkin, Jacob Morrison, LJ Miranda, Bill Yuchen Lin, Khyathi Chandu, Tom Zick, Yejin Choi, Noah A. Smith, Hannaneh Hajishirzi
  arXiv paper code leaderboard
• Intentionally Unintentional Speech: Why Generative AI Models Are Not Protected by the First Amendment
  David Atkinson, Jena D. Hwang, Jacob Morrison
  First Amendment Law Review (University of North Carolina), Spring 2025 paper
• Unsettled Law in the Age of Generative AI: Time to Generate New Approaches?
  David Atkinson, Jacob Morrison
  Journal of Law and Technology at Texaspaper
• A Legal Risk Taxonomy for Generative Artificial Intelligence
  David Atkinson, Jacob Morrison
  arXiv preprint paper
• OLMo: Accelerating the Science of Language Models
  Dirk Groeneveld, Iz Beltagy, Pete Walsh, Akshita Bhagia, Rodney Kinney, Oyvind Tafjord, Ananya Harsh Jha, Hamish Ivison, Ian Magnusson, Yizhong Wang, Shane Arora, David Atkinson, Russell Authur, Khyathi Chandu, Arman Cohan, Jennifer Dumas, Yanai Elazar, Yuling Gu, Jack Hessel, Tushar Khot, William Merrill, Jacob Morrison, Niklas Muennighoff, Aakanksha Naik, Crystal Nam, Matthew E. Peters, Valentina Pyatkin, Abhilasha Ravichander, Dustin Schwenk, Saurabh Shah, Will Smith, Emma Strubell, Nishant Subramani, Mitchell Wortsman, Pradeep Dasigi, Nathan Lambert, Kyle Richardson, Luke Zettlemoyer, Jesse Dodge, Kyle Lo, Luca Soldaini, Noah A. Smith, Hannaneh Hajishirzi
  ACL 2024 paper 🥇 Theme Paper Award 🥇
• Dolma: an Open Corpus of Three Trillion Tokens for Language Model Pretraining Research
  Luca Soldaini, Rodney Kinney, Akshita Bhagia, Dustin Schwenk, David Atkinson, Russell Authur, Ben Bogin, Khyathi Chandu, Jennifer Dumas, Yanai Elazar, Valentin Hofmann, Ananya Harsh Jha, Sachin Kumar, Li Lucy, Xinxi Lyu, Nathan Lambert, Ian Magnusson, Jacob Morrison, Niklas Muennighoff, Aakanksha Naik, Crystal Nam, Matthew E. Peters, Abhilasha Ravichander, Kyle Richardson, Zejiang Shen, Emma Strubell, Nishant Subramani, Oyvind Tafjord, Evan Pete Walsh, Hannaneh Hajishirzi, Noah A. Smith, Luke Zettlemoyer, Iz Beltagy, Dirk Groeneveld, Jesse Dodge, Kyle Lo
  ACL 2024 paper 🥇 Best Resource Paper Award 🥇

2022

• Bidimensional Leaderboards: Generate and Evaluate Language Hand in Hand
  Jungo Kasai, Keisuke Sakaguchi, Ronan Le Bras, Lavinia Dunagan, Jacob Morrison, Alexander R. Fabbri, Yejin Choi, Noah A. Smith
  NAACL 2022 paper
• Transparent Human Evaluation for Image Captioning
  Jungo Kasai, Keisuke Sakaguchi, Lavinia Dunagan, Jacob Morrison, Ronan Le Bras, Yejin Choi, Noah A. Smith
  NAACL 2022 paper