Michael Dorkenwald

I’m an AI Scientist Intern at Mistral AI, working on multimodal large language models across pretraining and post-training. I’m also a PhD candidate at the University of Amsterdam / ELLIS, advised by Yuki Asano and Cees Snoek.

My research focuses on vision–language learning, video understanding, and computational efficiency.

Previously, I was a Student Researcher at Google DeepMind and a Research Intern at Amazon Web Services (AWS) on the Rekognition team.

Portrait of Michael Dorkenwald
AI Scientist Intern · Mistral AI
PhD candidate · UvA / ELLIS

Selected research

Google Scholar

First-author and co-first-author papers. * denotes equal contribution.

Temporal understandingTVBench · BMVC 2025Equal contribution

Lost in Time: A New Temporal Benchmark for VideoLLMs

D. Cores*, M. Dorkenwald*, M. Mucientes, C. Snoek, Y. Asano

We introduce TVBench, a 10-task benchmark for temporal understanding in video–language models. It addresses shortcuts in existing benchmarks that let models answer from text or a single frame.

Representation learningECCV 2024Equal contribution

SIGMA: Sinkhorn-Guided Masked Video Modeling

M. Salehi*, M. Dorkenwald*, F. Thoker*, E. Gavves, C. Snoek, Y. Asano

We jointly learn a video encoder and its prediction targets through masked modeling. Balanced clustering prevents representation collapse and provides targets that capture semantic and temporal information.

arXiv 2025

KV Cache Steering for Controlling Frozen LLMs

M. Belitsky, D. J. Kopiczko, M. Dorkenwald, M. J. Mirza, J. R. Glass, C. Snoek, Y. Asano

Steering frozen language models with a single intervention in the key–value cache, without fine-tuning or changing the prompt.

Earlier work · representation learning & generative modeling

Research experience

Research across industry and academia, with a foundation in representation learning and computational physics.

2026–present

Mistral AI

AI Scientist Intern

Research on pretraining and post-training multimodal large language models.

2026

Google DeepMind

Student Researcher

Research on efficient video tokenization and pretraining.

2022–present

University of Amsterdam

PhD Candidate · QUVA Lab / ELLIS

Spatial grounding in vision–language models, temporal evaluation, self-supervised video representations, and model efficiency. Supervised by Yuki Asano and Cees Snoek.

2019–2022

Heidelberg University

MSc Computational Physics · CompVis

Generative modeling with Björn Ommer’s group, including image-to-video synthesis with conditional normalizing flows. Research visit with Kosta Derpanis in Toronto.

Teaching & community

News & earlier updates
  • Joined Mistral AI as an AI Scientist Intern.
  • Joined Google DeepMind as a Student Researcher.
  • Elastic ViTs accepted to NeurIPS 2025.
  • TVBench accepted to BMVC 2025.
  • GLOV accepted to TMLR.
  • SIGMA accepted to ECCV 2024.
  • Research talks at TNO in The Hague and the National Institute of Informatics in Tokyo.

Get in touch

For research inquiries and collaborations: