About Me

Hi!

I’m Mark, a Master’s student in Language Science and Technology at Saarland University.

I work as a research assistant at Language, Computation and Cognition Lab. Earlier, I served as a Natural Language Processing engineer at Yandex, developing state-of-the-art LLMs for the Russian language. I also interned at Tinkoff AI and Computational Pragmatics Lab at HSE University.

Given the early stage of my career, my research interests are broad. They are centered around understanding the internal mechanics of state-of-the-art neural networks, both artificial and biological. Is there a theoretical model of Transformer-learnable functions? How can we use Deep Learning to draw inferences about the human brain? What interpretable processes happen in LLMs when they answer a query? Those are some of the topics that I am curious about.


News

August 2024 — Honored and excited to receive ACL 2024 best paper award for "Why are Sensitive Functions Hard for Transformers?"!

May 2024 — Our paper "Why are Sensitive Functions Hard for Transformers?" was accepted to ACL 2024! My talk about it at FLaNN seminar: link. Twitter thread: link.

April 2024 — Had a great time at ALPS 2024 winter school! Magnificent mountains, great lectures, and insightful discussions.

February 2024 — A new preprint is out! We find a theoretical explanation for why Transformers struggle to learn sensitive functions such as Parity and show empirical evidence supporting our reasoning. arXiv link

November 2023 — I am joining Department of Language Science and Technology at Saarland University as a research assistant! I will be working on LLM interpretability under the supervision of Michael Hahn.

October 2023 — I have arrived to Saarbrücken to start my Master's studies at Saarland University. Extremely happy to finally be here!

June 2023 — Today I have successfully defended my Bachelor Thesis! Now I officially hold a B.S. in Computer Science.

May 2023 — I took part in EACL 2023, located in scenic Dubrovnik, Croatia. A big thanks to all the organizers for their excellent work!

January 2023 — Excited to share that our paper "Vote’n’Rank: Revision of Benchmarking with Social Choice Theory" got accepted to EACL 2023!

November 2022 — This month, I have started working as a Large Language Model Developer at Yandex.