Elia Bruni

Hello, I'm

Elia Bruni

Professor of Natural Language Processing
University of Osnabrück

01 – About

I am a Professor of Natural Language Processing at the University of Osnabrück. My research focuses on understanding and evaluating how AI systems reason – particularly probing the capabilities and limitations of large language models and vision-language models across visual reasoning, grounded language understanding, and emergent communication.

Previously, I was a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellow at Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona). I obtained my PhD at the University of Trento, working on multimodal distributional semantics.

02 – Research

My work lies at the intersection of natural language processing, computer vision, machine learning, and vision-language models, with a growing interest in embodied AI. Current research directions include:

  • Probing and evaluating vision-language models for visual-spatial reasoning and intuitive physics
  • Benchmarking multimodal AI systems (iVISPAR, SPLICE, GRASP)
  • Emergent communication in situated and open-ended environments
  • Consistency and interpretability of large language models
  • Grounded language understanding and physical reasoning