Ihor Vitenko
igor [dot] vitenko13 [at] gmail [dot] com
I’m a Research Engineer at Reface, where I work on BitePal — an AI calorie tracker app. I build core features end to end, focusing on multimodal alignment, synthetic data generation, and optimal technical solutions to support business requests.
Previously, I was a Research Fellow (RAI for Ukraine program) at the Center for Responsible AI at New York University, working on RL policy reusability. Our paper from that work was accepted to the CIKM 2026 Short Paper Track. I also worked as a Machine Learning Engineer for one year, focused on service solutions for diverse businesses.
Research
My research interests lie at the intersection of multimodal AI and post-training. I’m especially interested in vision-language models and building robust, grounded capabilities around them. I also love exploring post-training recipes (from synthetic data generation to training loops) that push language models, especially small ones, to achieve strong performance on specific tasks despite their limited scale. Hybrid transformer architectures are another area I follow.
I’m also interested in long-horizon agentic tasks and the RL environments used to train them, in the interpretability of agent decisions, and in the mathematical tools beneath both — game theory in particular.
Education
Honors, Awards
- Awarded 3rd Place in the First Round of the All-Ukrainian Student Research Competition in Fields of Knowledge and Specialties for the 2024/2025 academic year for my bachelor’s thesis work (see certificate).
Personal
- Sports are an inseparable part of my life: I train kickboxing, previously ran a half marathon, and rode 140 km in one day by bicycle through cities in Kyiv Oblast that suffered during the Battle of Kyiv (2022).
- I enjoy billiards (pool) and can happily spend hours practicing it.
- I’m a huge Star Wars fan.