Biography:Yonatan Belinkov

From HandWiki
Yonatan Belinkov
Alma materMassachusetts Institute of Technology (PhD)
Tel Aviv University (BSc, MA)
Scientific career
FieldsNatural language processing, machine learning
InstitutionsTechnion – Israel Institute of Technology
Websitebelinkov.com

Yonatan Belinkov is a computer scientist working on natural language processing, machine learning and artificial intelligence. He is an associate professor in the Henry and Marilyn Taub Faculty of Computer Science at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology.[1][2]


Education and career

Belinkov received a BSc and an MA from Tel Aviv University in mathematics and Arabic and Islamic studies. He received a PhD in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2018.[3]

After completing his doctorate, Belinkov held postdoctoral positions at Harvard and at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.[3] He joined the Technion faculty in 2020[4] and is now an associate professor.[2]

During the 2025–2026 academic year, Belinkov was a visiting scholar at Harvard's Kempner Institute.[3]

Contributions

Belinkov has worked on the analysis of neural language models, including what information is represented in different parts of a model. In research covered by MIT News in 2017 and 2019, he and collaborators studied neural networks for machine translation and speech recognition, and methods for identifying neurons associated with linguistic features such as number and gender.[5][6]

With Jonathan S. Rosenfeld, Amir Rosenfeld, and Nir Shavit, he co-authored A Constructive Prediction of the Generalization Error Across Scales, an ICLR 2020 paper on predicting neural-network generalization error across model and data scales.[7]

Belinkov also coauthored Locating and Editing Factual Associations in GPT, a 2022 NeurIPS paper that introduced Rank-One Model Editing, or ROME, a method for making targeted changes to factual associations in transformer language models without retraining the whole model.[8] Later work on model editing has treated ROME as a central locate-and-edit method.[9]


Recognition

Belinkov received a Harvard Mind, Brain, and Behavior Postdoctoral Fellowship and an Azrieli Early Career Faculty Fellowship.[10][2] In 2024, he received a European Research Council Starting Grant for Control-LM, a project on controlling large language models.[11] In 2025, he received the Krill Prize for Excellence in Scientific Research from the Wolf Foundation.[4]

His paper Backward Lens: Projecting Language Model Gradients into the Vocabulary Space, with Shahar Katz, Mor Geva and Lior Wolf, received a Best Paper Award at EMNLP 2024.[12]

References

  1. ↑ "Yonatan Belinkov". Technion – Israel Institute of Technology. https://cris.technion.ac.il/en/persons/yonatan-belinkov/. 
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 "Fellows' Appointment, Promotions, and Achievements – Spring 2026". 3 March 2026. https://azrielifoundation.org/azrieli-fellows-news/fellows-appointment-promotions-and-achievements-spring-2026/. 
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 "Yonatan Belinkov". Harvard University. https://kempnerinstitute.harvard.edu/people/our-people/yonatan-belinkov/. 
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 "Two Technion Faculty Members Win the Krill Prize". 21 May 2025. https://www.technion.ac.il/en/blog/article/two-technion-faculty-members-win-the-krill-prize/. 
  5. ↑ Hardesty, Larry (10 December 2017). "Reading a neural network's mind". MIT News. https://news.mit.edu/2017/reading-neural-network-mind-1211. 
  6. ↑ Matheson, Rob (1 February 2019). "Putting neural networks under the microscope". MIT News. https://news.mit.edu/2019/neural-networks-nlp-microscope-0201. 
  7. ↑ Rosenfeld, Jonathan S.; Rosenfeld, Amir; Belinkov, Yonatan; Shavit, Nir (2020). "A Constructive Prediction of the Generalization Error Across Scales". International Conference on Learning Representations. https://openreview.net/forum?id=ryenvpEKDr. Retrieved 10 May 2026. 
  8. ↑ Meng, Kevin; Bau, David; Andonian, Alex J.; Belinkov, Yonatan (2022). "Locating and Editing Factual Associations in GPT". Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems. https://openreview.net/forum?id=-h6WAS6eE4. Retrieved 29 April 2026. 
  9. ↑ Cohen, Roi; Biran, Eden; Yoran, Ori; Globerson, Amir; Geva, Mor (2024). "Evaluating the Ripple Effects of Knowledge Editing in Language Models". Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics. doi:10.1162/tacl_a_00644. https://direct.mit.edu/tacl/article/doi/10.1162/tacl_a_00644/120576/Evaluating-the-Ripple-Effects-of-Knowledge. Retrieved 10 May 2026. 
  10. ↑ "Dr. Yonatan Belinkov". Technion Research & Development Foundation. https://t3.technion.ac.il/researcher/belinkov-yonatan/. 
  11. ↑ "Four Technion Researchers Receive ERC Starting Grants". 5 September 2024. https://www.technion.ac.il/en/blog/2024/09/four-technion-researchers-receive-erc-starting-grants/. 
  12. ↑ Katz, Shahar; Belinkov, Yonatan; Geva, Mor; Wolf, Lior (2024). "Backward Lens: Projecting Language Model Gradients into the Vocabulary Space". Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. pp. 2390–2422. doi:10.18653/v1/2024.emnlp-main.142. https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.142/. Retrieved 29 April 2026. 



Retrieved from "https://handwiki.org/wiki/index.php?title=Biography:Yonatan_Belinkov&oldid=4405707"