YANIV NIKANKIN
Yaniv Nikankin

I'm a PhD student at the CS NLP lab at the Technion, advised by Prof. Yonatan Belinkov. I like digging into complex mechanisms, and currently work on scaling up mechanistic interpretability of neural networks across language, vision and biology. I'm particularly interested in developing more robust interpretability techniques and applying them to complex tasks, with the ultimate goal of building better models that can be automatically interpreted.

I completed my M.Sc under the supervision of Prof. Michal Irani, and prior to that I've worked as a software engineer in industry and received my B.Sc in Computer science.

Selected Publications

Visit my Google Scholar for a full list of my publications.

  1. Same Task, Different Circuits: Disentangling Modality-Specific Mechanisms in VLMs

    • Yaniv Nikankin, Dana Arad, Yossi Gandelsman and Yonatan Belinkov
    • Preprint
    Arxiv Code Project Page

  2. Arithmetic Without Algorithms: Language Models Solve Math With a Bag of Heuristics

    • Yaniv Nikankin, Anja Reusch, Aaron Mueller and Yonatan Belinkov
    • ICLR 2025
    Arxiv Code Project Page

  3. Deconstructing Data Reconstruction: Multiclass, Weight Decay and General Losses

    • Gon Buzaglo, Niv Haim, Gilad Yehudai, Gal Vardi, Yakir Oz, Yaniv Nikankin and Michal Irani
    • NeurIPS 2023
    Arxiv Code

  4. SinFusion: Training Diffusion Models on a Single Image or Video

    • Yaniv Nikankin, Niv Haim and Michal Irani
    • ICML 2023
    Arxiv Code Project Page

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