Yotam Perlitz

Yotam Perlitz is a Research Staff Member at IBM Research in Switzerland, where he drives advancements at the intersection of statistical methods and artificial intelligence. His current work focuses on efficient evaluation techniques, training large language models (LLMs), and developing Text2SQL solutions. Yotam actively collaborates with numerous academic institutions, bridging the gap between industry and academia through his research and expertise.

Yotam holds a Master’s degree in Theoretical Physics from The Weizmann Institute of Science, where he honed his analytical and problem-solving skills. Prior to joining IBM, he was an Algorithm Researcher at Samsung Israel R&D Center (SIRC), specializing in deep learning for computer vision. There, he developed an ultra-lightweight object-detection and denoising mechanism based on convolutional neural networks (CNNs), which was patented, published, and deployed to over 100 million smartphones, including the Galaxy line. He also built and maintained a multi-GPU experiment framework for reproducible neural network training, utilized GAN-based domain adaptation to overcome scarce data challenges, and served as his team’s infrastructure leader, collaborating with internal teams and third-party providers.

At IBM Research, Yotam has made significant contributions, including improving out-of-domain paraphrase generation using reinforcement learning, implementing data-to-text generation methods with an emphasis on diversity and quality, and developing a novel active learning strategy for text generation. A prolific researcher, he has authored numerous papers and delivered talks at academic tutorials and conferences.

Yotam’s work has earned him multiple accolades, including the Technical Collaboration Achievement Program (TCAP) Award and three A-Level IBM Accomplishments, recognizing his technical excellence and impact. Beyond his professional life, Yotam is a father of two and an avid photographer, baker, and barefoot long-distance runner. He also enjoys playing the piano, hiking, and mountaineering, passions that fuel his creativity and resilience.