Yedi Zhang

Postdoc at National University of Singapore

Email: yd.zhang@nus.edu.sg

Research Topics

Formal Methods
Automated Verification
Safety & Security of AI Systems

Now I am a Postdoc at National University of Singapore (NUS), working with Prof. Jin-Song Dong and Prof. Jun Sun. Before joining NUS, I received my PhD degree from School of Information Science and Technology (SIST) at ShanghaiTech University, advised by Prof. Fu Song. I also studied as a visiting Ph.D. student at Singapore Management University (Mar. 2022 to Mar. 2023), under the supervision of Prof. Jun Sun, and at Universität des Saarlandes (Oct. 2019 to Mar. 2020), under the supervision of Prof. Holger Hermanns. I received my Bachelor's degree from Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications (BUPT).

My research is motivated by a simple goal: towards robust and verified AI Systems. More specifically, to develop theories and tools for the certification of AI systems, with rigorous and provable guarantees of safety and security.

I am looking for collaborations!!! I am always open to potential collaborations, particularly in the areas of Trustworthy AI, Safety and Security of Agentic AI, and Formal Methods. If you are interested in these topics and would like to collaborate, discuss research ideas, or work with us remotely, please feel free to contact me via email.

News

📃 2025/09 -- One paper is accepted by NeurIPS 2025.
📃 2025/05 -- One paper is accepted by ICML 2025.
📃 2025/02 -- One paper is accepted by OOPSLA 2025.
📃 2025/01 -- One paper is accepted by USENIX Security 2025.
🌏🇳🇱 2025/01 -- I attended the F+Cube Mentorship Training Program at TU Delft in the Netherlands.
📃 2024/11 -- One paper is accepted by NDSS 2025.
🌏🇮🇹 2024/09 -- I gave an oral presentation for our FM paper in Milan, Italy.
🎉 2024/09 -- I am awarded with CCF Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award in Formal Methods 2024.
🎉 2024/08 -- I have been selected as a mentee at F+Cube 2024, an award-winning Future Female+ Faculty mentorship program.
📃 2024/08 -- One paper is accepted by ASE 2024.
📃 2024/06 -- One paper is accepted by FM 2024.

📃 2023/12 -- One paper is accepted by AAAI 2024.

📃 2023/09 -- One paper is accepted by NDSS 2024.

📃 2023/09 -- One paper is accepted by OOPSLA 2023.

🎉 2023/08 -- I became a Research Fellow at NUS, Singapore 🇸🇬!

🌏🇫🇷 2023/07 -- I gave an oral presentation for our CAV paper in Paris, France.

🎉 2023/06 -- Get my PhD degree! Congrats to myself - Dr. Zhang!

📃 2023/05 -- One paper is accepted by USENIX Security 2023.

📃 2023/04 -- One paper is accepted by CAV 2023.

🎉 2022/10 -- I am awarded with 2022 National Scholarship for Doctoral Students!

📃 2022/08 -- One journal paper is accepted by TOSEM 2022.

📃 2022/07 -- One paper is accepted by ASE 2022.

📃 2022/07 -- One paper is accepted by SAS 2022.

🌏🇸🇬 2022/03 -- I started my year-long visit at Singapore Management University, supervised by Prof. Jun Sun.

📃 2021/04 -- One paper is accepted by CAV 2021.

🌏🇩🇪 2019/10 -- I visited Dependable Systems and Software group at Universität des Saarlandes.

📃 2019/07 -- One paper accepted by IEEE Access 2019.

🌏🇺🇸 2019/02 -- I gave my first oral presentation! (for our AAAI 2019 paper at Hawaii, USA)

📃 2018/10 -- One paper accepted by AAAI 2019.

Publications (show all by year)

(co-first author^#, corresponding author*)

[C14] RvLLM: LLM Runtime Verification with Domain Knowledge
Yedi Zhang*, Sun Yi Emma, Annabelle Lee Jia En, Jin Song Dong
The Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2025. [Preprint Paper] [CCF-A, CORE-A*]
[Pre2] Towards Powerful and Practical Patch Attacks for 2D Object Detection in Autonomous Driving
Yuxin Cao, Yedi Zhang*, Wentao He, Yifan Liao, Yan Xiao, Chang Li, Zhiyong Huang, Jin Song Dong
[Pre1] Towards Stealthy and Effective Backdoor Attacks on Lane Detection: A Naturalistic Data Poisoning Approach
Yifan Liao, Yuxin Cao, Yedi Zhang*, Wentao He, Yan Xiao, Xianglong Du, Zhiyong Huang, Jin Song Dong
[C13] Position: Trustworthy AI Agents Require the Integration of Large Language Models and Formal Methods
Yedi Zhang^#*, Yufan Cai, Xinyue Zuo, Xiaokun Luan, Kailong Wang, Zhe Hou, Yifan Zhang, Zhiyuan Wei, Meng Sun, Jun Sun, Jing Sun , Jin Song Dong
International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2025. [Long Paper] [CCF-A, CORE-A*]
[J5] Verification of Bit-Flip Attacks against Quantized Neural Networks
Yedi Zhang, Lei Huang, Pengfei Gao, Fu Song, Jun Sun, Jin Song Dong
Object-Oriented Programming Systems, Languages, and Applications (OOPSLA), 2025. [Long Paper] [Code] [CCF-A, CORE-A]
[C12] Whispering Under the Eaves: Protecting User Privacy Against Commercial and LLM-empowered Automatic Speech Recognition Systems
Weifei Jin, Yuxin Cao, Junjie Su, Derui Wang, Yedi Zhang, Minhui Xue, Jie Hao, Jin Song Dong, Yixian Yang
USENIX Security, 2025. [CCF-A, CORE-A*]
[C11] SongBsAb: A Dual Prevention Approach against Singing Voice Conversion based Illegal Song Covers
Guangke Chen, Yedi Zhang, Fu Song, Ting Wang, Xiaoning Du, Yang Liu
Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS), 2025. [CCF-A, CORE-A*]
[C10] Revisiting the Conflict-Resolving Problem from a Semantic Perspective
Jinhao Dong, Jun Sun, Yun Lin, Yedi Zhang, Murong Ma, Jin Song Dong, Dan Hao
International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE), 2024. [CCF-A, CORE-A*]
[C9] Certified Quantization Strategy Synthesis for Neural Networks
Yedi Zhang, Guangke Chen, Fu Song, Jun Sun, Jin Song Dong
International Symposium on Formal Methods (FM), 2024. [Long Paper] [Code] [CCF-A, CORE-A]
[C8] Toward Efficient Verification of Quantized Neural Networks
Pei Huang, Haoze Wu, Min Wu, Ieva Daukantas, Yedi Zhang, Clark Barrett
Proceedings of the 38th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), 2024. [CCF-A, CORE-A*]
[C7] SLMIA-SR: Speaker-Level Membership Inference Attacks against Speaker Recognition Systems
Guangke Chen, Yedi Zhang, Fu Song
Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS), 2024. [Code] [CCF-A, CORE-A*]
[J4] Compositional Verification of Efficient Masking Countermeasures against Side-Channel Attacks
Pengfei Gao, Yedi Zhang, Fu Song, Taolue Chen, Francois-Xavier Standaert
Object-Oriented Programming Systems, Languages, and Applications (OOPSLA), 2023. [CCF-A, CORE-A]
[C6] QFA2SR: Query-Free Adversarial Transfer Attacks to Speaker Recognition Systems
Guangke Chen, Yedi Zhang, Zhe Zhao Fu Song
USENIX Security, 2023. [Website] [CCF-A, CORE-A*]
[C5] QEBVerif: Quantization Error Bound Verification of Neural Networks
Yedi Zhang, Fu Song, Jun Sun

International Conference on Computer-Aided Verification (CAV), 2023. [Code] [CCF-A, CORE-A*]
[J3] Precise Quantitative Analysis of Binarized Neural Networks: A BDD-based Approach

Yedi Zhang, Zhe Zhao, Guangke Chen, Fu Song, Taolue Chen

ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (TOSEM), 2023. [Code] [CCF-A]
[C4] QVIP: An ILP-based Formal Verification Approach for Quantized Neural Networks
Yedi Zhang, Zhe Zhao, Guangke Chen, Fu Song, Min Zhang, Taolue Chen, Jun Sun
International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE), 2022. [Code] [CCF-A, CORE-A*]
[C3] CLEVEREST: Accelerating CEGAR-based Neural Network Verification via Adversarial Attacks
Zhe Zhao, Yedi Zhang, Guangke Chen, Fu Song, Taolue Chen, Jiaxiang Liu
International Static Analysis Symposium (SAS), 2022. [CCF-B, CORE-B]
[C2] BDD4BNN: A BDD-based Quantitative Analysis Framework for Binarized Neural Networks
Yedi Zhang, Zhe Zhao, Guangke Chen, Fu Song, Taolue Chen
International Conference on Computer-Aided Verification (CAV), 2021. [Code] [CCF-A, CORE-A*]
[J2] Making Agents Abilities Explicit
Yedi Zhang, Fu Song, Taolue Chen
IEEE Access, 2019. [Code]
[C1] Probabilistic Alternating-Time Mu-Calculus
Fu Song, Yedi Zhang*, Taolue Chen, Yu Tang, Zhiwu Xu
Proceedings of the 33rd AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), 2019. [Code] (Oral) [CCF-A, CORE-A*]
A model checker for PAMC (Probabilistic Alternating-Time Mu-Calculus) can also be found here.
[J1] Model Checking for Heterogeneous Multi-agent Systems (In Chinese)
Yedi Zhang, Fu Song
Journal of Software (JOS), 2018. (Presented on FMAC 2017)

Services

Conference Reviewer/Program Committee:
- The 14th International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR 2026)
- The 40th Annual AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2026)
- ChinaSoft 2025, Formal Methods and Applications track
- The 32nd Asia-Pacific Software Engineering Conference (APSEC 2025), Software Engineering in Practice (SEIP) track
- The 30th Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2025)
- The 33rd ACM International Conference on Multimedia (ACM'MM 2025)
- The 48th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2026)
- The 23rd International Symposium on Automated Technology for Verification and Analysis (ATVA 2025) (Artifact Evaluation)
- The 37th International Conference on Computer Aided Verification (CAV 2025)
- The 19th International Symposium on Theoretical Aspects of Software Engineering (TASE 2025)
- The 13th International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR 2025)
- The 28th IEEE Pacific Rim International Symposium on Dependable Computing (PRDC 2023)
Journal Reviewer:
- Transactions on Software Engineering 2025
- Formal Aspects of Computing 2024

Awards

CCF Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award in Formal Methods, 2024
Outstanding Doctoral Graduates of Shanghai, 2023
Outstanding Doctoral Graduates of ShanghaiTech University, 2023
National Scholarship for Doctoral Students, 2022
Excellent Student at ShanghaiTech University, 2021
Excellent Student at ShanghaiTech University, 2020
CSC-IBM Excellent Chinese Student Scholarship, 2019
Merit Student at ShanghaiTech University, 2019
AAAI Travel Grant, 2019
ICM Meritorious Winner, 2016

Teaching

Teaching Assistant -- Theory of Computation, Fall 2020
Teaching Assistant -- Theory of Computation, Spring 2019.
Teaching Assistant -- Introduction to Programming, Fall 2018.