Christopher Clark
I am a senior research scientist at the non-profit AI research institute the Allen Institute for AI where I lead the open-ecosystem multi-modal team. Our team works on vision-language models, with a focus on openness, training efficiency, and visual grounding. My recent work has been on the Molmo line of models -- vision-language models that are fully open (sharing weights, code and training data), avoid distilling from proprietary models, and are state-of-the-art at grounding. Previously I worked on unified any-to-any models in the UnifiedIO line of models. At various points in the past I have also worked on data generation, generalization, language model pre-training, game-playing and evaluation. I received my PhD from UW where I was advised by Luke Zettlemoyer.
Publications
MolmoPoint: Better Pointing for VLMs with Grounding Tokens
Christopher Clark, Yue Yang, Jae Sung Park, Zixian Ma, Jieyu Zhang, Rohun Tripathi, Mohammadreza Salehi, Sangho Lee, Taira Anderson, Winson Han, Ranjay Krishna
In ECCV 2026
[paper]
Molmo2: Open Weights and Data for Vision-Language Models with Video Understanding and Grounding
Christopher Clark*, Jieyu Zhang*, Zixian Ma*, Jae Sung Park*, Mohammadreza Salehi, Rohun Tripathi, Sangho Lee, Zhongzheng Ren, Chris Dongjoo Kim, Yinuo Yang, Vincent Shao, Yue Yang, Weikai Huang, Ziqi Gao, Taira Anderson, Jianrui Zhang, Jitesh Jain, George Stoica, Winson Han, Ali Farhadi, Ranjay Krishna
In CVPR 2026, Best Paper Award Candidate
[paper]
[code]
[blog]
SAGE: Training Smart Any-Horizon Agents for Long Video Reasoning with Reinforcement Learning
Jitesh Jain, Jialuo Li, Zixian Ma, Jieyu Zhang, Chris Dongjoo Kim, Sangho Lee, Rohun Tripathi, Tanmay Gupta, Christopher Clark, Humphrey Shi
In CVPR 2026
[paper]
Molmo and PixMo: Open Weights and Open Data for State-of-the-Art Vision-Language Models
Matt Deitke*, Christopher Clark*, Sangho Lee, Rohun Tripathi, Yue Yang, Jae Sung Park, Mohammadreza Salehi, Niklas Muennighoff, Kyle Lo, Luca Soldaini, Jiasen Lu, Taira Anderson, Erin Bransom, Kiana Ehsani, Huong Ngo, YenSung Chen, Ajay Patel, Mark Yatskar, Chris Callison-Burch, Andrew Head, Rose Hendrix, Favyen Bastani, Eli VanderBilt, Nathan Lambert, Yvonne Chou, Arnavi Chheda, Jenna Sparks, Sam Skjonsberg, Michael Schmitz, Aaron Sarnat, Byron Bischoff, Pete Walsh, Chris Newell, Piper Wolters, Tanmay Gupta, Kuo-Hao Zeng, Jon Borchardt, Dirk Groeneveld, Jen Dumas, Crystal Nam, Sophie Lebrecht, Caitlin Wittlif, Carissa Schoenick, Oscar Michel, Ranjay Krishna, Luca Weihs, Noah A. Smith, Hannaneh Hajishirzi, Ross Girshick, Ali Farhadi, Aniruddha Kembhavi
In CVPR 2025, Best Paper Honorable Mention
[paper]
[code]
[demo]
[blog]
Scaling Text-Rich Image Understanding via Code-Guided Synthetic Multimodal Data Generation
Yue Yang, Ajay Patel, Matt Deitke, Tanmay Gupta, Luca Weihs, Andrew Head, Mark Yatskar, Chris Callison-Burch, Ranjay Krishna, Aniruddha Kembhavi, Christopher Clark
In ACL 2025
[paper]
2 OLMo 2 Furious
Team OLMo
In COLM 2025
[paper]
Unified-IO 2: Scaling Autoregressive Multimodal Models with Vision, Language, Audio, and Action
Jiasen Lu*, Christopher Clark*, Sangho Lee*, Zichen Zhang*, Savya Khosla, Ryan Marten, Derek Hoiem, Aniruddha Kembhavi
In CVPR 2024
[paper]
[code]
[project page]
Holodeck: Language Guided Generation of 3D Embodied AI Environments
Yue Yang, Fan-Yun Sun, Luca Weihs, Eli VanderBilt, Alvaro Herrasti, Winson Han, Jiajun Wu, Nick Haber, Ranjay Krishna, Lingjie Liu, Chris Callison-Burch, Mark Yatskar, Aniruddha Kembhavi, Christopher Clark
In CVPR 2024
[paper]
[demo]
I can't believe there's no images! Learning Visual Tasks Using only Language Data
Sophia Gu*, Christopher Clark*, Aniruddha Kembhavi
In ICCV 2023
[paper]
[code]
[project page]
A-OKVQA: A Benchmark for Visual Question Answering using World Knowledge
Dustin Schwenk, Apoorv Khandelwal, Christopher Clark, Kenneth Marino, Roozbeh Mottaghi
In ECCV 2022
[paper]
[code]
[project page]
Webly Supervised Concept Expansion for General Purpose Vision Models
Amita Kamath*, Christopher Clark*, Tanmay Gupta*, Eric Kolve, Derek Hoiem, Aniruddha Kembhavi
In ECCV 2022
[paper]
[code]
[demo]
[project page]
Iconary: A Pictionary-Based Game for Testing Multimodal Communication with Drawings and Text
Christopher Clark, Jordi Salvador, Dustin Schwenk, Derrick Bonafilia, Mark Yatskar, Eric Kolve, Alvaro Herrasti, Jonghyun Choi, Sachin Mehta, Sam Skjonsberg, Carissa Schoenick, Aaron Sarnat, Hannaneh Hajishirzi, Aniruddha Kembhavi, Oren Etzioni, Ali Farhadi
In EMNLP 2021
[paper]
[code]
BoolQ: Exploring the Surprising Difficulty of Natural Yes/No Questions
Christopher Clark, Kenton Lee, Ming-Wei Chang, Tom Kwiatkowski, Michael Collins, Kristina Toutanova
In NAACL 2019
[paper]
[dataset]
[leaderboard]