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Yaniv Nikankin

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5 papers

2 author rows

ICLR Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Arithmetic Without Algorithms: Language Models Solve Math with a Bag of Heuristics

Yaniv Nikankin
Anja Reusch
Aaron Mueller
Yonatan Belinkov

Do large language models (LLMs) solve reasoning tasks by learning robust generalizable algorithms, or do they memorize training data? To investigate this question, we use arithmetic reasoning as a representative task. Using causal analysis, we identify a subset of the model (a circuit) that explains most of the model's behavior for basic arithmetic logic and examine its functionality. By zooming in on the level of individual circuit neurons, we discover a sparse set of important neurons that implement simple heuristics. Each heuristic identifies a numerical input pattern and outputs corresponding answers. We hypothesize that the combination of these heuristic neurons is the mechanism used to produce correct arithmetic answers. To test this, we categorize each neuron into several heuristic types---such as neurons that activate when an operand falls within a certain range---and find that the unordered combination of these heuristic types is the mechanism that explains most of the model's accuracy on arithmetic prompts. Finally, we demonstrate that this mechanism appears as the main source of arithmetic accuracy early in training. Overall, our experimental results across several LLMs show that LLMs perform arithmetic using neither robust algorithms nor memorization; rather, they rely on a ``bag of heuristics''.

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ICML Conference 2025 Conference Paper

MIB: A Mechanistic Interpretability Benchmark

Aaron Mueller
Atticus Geiger
Sarah Wiegreffe
Dana Arad
Iván Arcuschin
Adam Belfki
Yik Siu Chan
Jaden Fried Fiotto-Kaufman

How can we know whether new mechanistic interpretability methods achieve real improvements? In pursuit of lasting evaluation standards, we propose MIB, a Mechanistic Interpretability Benchmark, with two tracks spanning four tasks and five models. MIB favors methods that precisely and concisely recover relevant causal pathways or causal variables in neural language models. The circuit localization track compares methods that locate the model components—and connections between them—most important for performing a task (e. g. , attribution patching or information flow routes). The causal variable track compares methods that featurize a hidden vector, e. g. , sparse autoencoders (SAE) or distributed alignment search (DAS), and align those features to a task-relevant causal variable. Using MIB, we find that attribution and mask optimization methods perform best on circuit localization. For causal variable localization, we find that the supervised DAS method performs best, while SAEs features are not better than neurons, i. e. , non-featurized hidden vectors. These findings illustrate that MIB enables meaningful comparisons, and increases our confidence that there has been real progress in the field.

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NeurIPS Conference 2025 Conference Paper

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

Yaniv Nikankin
Dana Arad
Yossi Gandelsman
Yonatan Belinkov

Vision-Language models (VLMs) show impressive abilities to answer questions on visual inputs (e. g. , counting objects in an image), yet demonstrate higher accuracies when performing an analogous task on text (e. g. , counting words in a text). We investigate this accuracy gap by identifying and comparing the circuits---the task-specific computational sub-graphs---in different modalities. We show that while circuits are largely disjoint between modalities, they implement relatively similar functionalities: the differences lie primarily in processing modality-specific data positions (an image or a text sequence). Zooming in on the image data representations, we observe they become aligned with the higher-performing analogous textual representations only towards later layers, too late in processing to effectively influence subsequent positions. To overcome this, we patch the representations of visual data tokens from later layers back into earlier layers. In experiments with multiple tasks and models, this simple intervention closes a third of the performance gap between the modalities, on average. Our analysis sheds light on the multi-modal performance gap in VLMs and suggests a training-free approach for reducing it.

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NeurIPS Conference 2023 Conference Paper

Deconstructing Data Reconstruction: Multiclass, Weight Decay and General Losses

Gon Buzaglo
Niv Haim
Gilad Yehudai
Gal Vardi
Yakir Oz
Yaniv Nikankin
Michal Irani

Memorization of training data is an active research area, yet our understanding of the inner workings of neural networks is still in its infancy. Recently, Haim et al. 2022 proposed a scheme to reconstruct training samples from multilayer perceptron binary classifiers, effectively demonstrating that a large portion of training samples are encoded in the parameters of such networks. In this work, we extend their findings in several directions, including reconstruction from multiclass and convolutional neural networks. We derive a more general reconstruction scheme which is applicable to a wider range of loss functions such as regression losses. Moreover, we study the various factors that contribute to networks' susceptibility to such reconstruction schemes. Intriguingly, we observe that using weight decay during training increases reconstructability both in terms of quantity and quality. Additionally, we examine the influence of the number of neurons relative to the number of training samples on the reconstructability. Code: https: //github. com/gonbuzaglo/decoreco

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ICML Conference 2023 Conference Paper

SinFusion: Training Diffusion Models on a Single Image or Video

Yaniv Nikankin
Niv Haim
Michal Irani

Diffusion models exhibited tremendous progress in image and video generation, exceeding GANs in quality and diversity. However, they are usually trained on very large datasets and are not naturally adapted to manipulate a given input image or video. In this paper we show how this can be resolved by training a diffusion model on a single input image or video. Our image/video-specific diffusion model (SinFusion) learns the appearance and dynamics of the single image or video, while utilizing the conditioning capabilities of diffusion models. It can solve a wide array of image/video-specific manipulation tasks. In particular, our model can learn from few frames the motion and dynamics of a single input video. It can then generate diverse new video samples of the same dynamic scene, extrapolate short videos into long ones (both forward and backward in time) and perform video upsampling. Most of these tasks are not realizable by current video-specific generation methods.

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