PhD, Technion (2026)

Deep learning researcher

I currently work on LLM inference and post-training as an AI Researcher at a stealth company.

During my PhD at the Technion (2026), with Alex Bronstein and Reuven Cohen, I worked on a wide range of problems: instantaneous VO₂ from smartwatches and from 3D pose in video, differentiable eikonal solvers for wildfire spread, encrypted network traffic as time series, and diagnostics of what large language models actually compute. The common thread was real-world data that is noisy, partly missing, and collected far from the lab, and models that build in the structure of the domain. From May to October 2026 I worked as an independent contractor with Apple's Video Engineering group.

Barak Gahtan
2 × ACML 2026First-author papers on LLM depth and attentionSGP 2026Differentiable eikonal solvers, Computer Graphics ForumICMI 2025 · oralFirst instantaneous VO₂ from a consumer smartwatchTechnion · ApplePhD in Computer Science; former independent contractor, Apple Video Engineering

Selected work

All 13 publications

Research themes

More about my research

What transformers actually compute

Calibration-free diagnostics that audit a model instead of trusting its headline scores: how much of its depth is distinct computation, whether a personalized model conditions on the user at all, and where pre-scoring query-key geometry helps attention.

Differentiable physics and inverse problems

Classical solvers kept inside the learning loop. Implicit differentiation through fast sweeping turns anisotropic Eikonal distance fields into trainable models of wildfire spread.

Physiology from low-friction signals

Instantaneous VO₂ and cardiovascular load estimated from smartwatches, chest straps and monocular 3D pose in video, with neural ODE and Kalman structure and four datasets collected in the field.

Encrypted network traffic as time series

QUIC traces rendered as image sequences and multi-operator cellular links as multivariate series, from a 100,000-trace public dataset to real-time network selection for teleoperated vehicles.