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Sankaran Vaidyanathan

Research Intern, Basis Research Institute

Sankaran Vaidyanathan is an intern at Basis and a PhD candidate at UMass Amherst. His research develops causal inference methods, particularly at the instance-specific and path-specific level, for mechanistic interpretability of neural networks. His work draws on causal mediation analysis, actual causality, and causal abstractions, with applications to explaining emergent reasoning capabilities in LLMs such as physical reasoning, in-context learning, and planning.