Alec Helbling

I am an ML PhD student at Georgia Tech advised by Polo Chau and supported by the NSF GRFP.

I work on methods for interpreting (e.g., ConceptAttention), visualizing (e.g., Diffusion Explorer, ManimML), and guiding the behavior of generative models (e.g., PrefGen) the behavior of generative models. I have a particular interest in models for generating images and video. I enjoy incorporating tools from data visualization and HCI into my work, creating interactive tools and videos for explaining how ML models and techniques work.

I have had the opportunity to work with many great people on a variety of topics in both academic and industry research labs: at Apple on the Responsible AI team on improving vision-language models, at Adobe Firefly on improving the safety of text-to-image models, at IBM Research on natural language summarization, at NASA JPL on interactive visual tools for space science, and at the University of Pittsburgh on computational biology.

profile photo
Recent Blog Posts and System Demos
Research

I am most interested in generative models, multimodal machine learning, and ML interpretability.