Yedi Zhang

Research Scientist at Google

Research Areas

Agentic Security
Formal Methods
Software Engineering

Hi, I am a Senior Research Scientist in Google, working on the agentic security across intelligent Android ecosystems [1, 2]. Our goal is to build a safer and more trustworthy platform for billions of active devices worldwide.

Before joining Google, I was a postdoctoral researcher at National University of Singapore, where I worked with Prof. Jiaheng Zhang, Prof. Jin-Song Dong and Prof. Jun Sun. I received my PhD degree from School of Information Science and Technology at ShanghaiTech University, advised by Prof. Fu Song. I also studied as a visiting 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.

News

🎉🎉 2026/10 -- I became a Research Scientist at Google 🇸🇬!
📃 2026/09 -- One paper is accepted by NeurIPS 2026.
📃 2026/04 -- One paper is accepted by CACM 2026.
📃 2026/02 -- One paper is accepted by CVPR 2026.
🌏🇺🇸 2025/12 -- I attended NeurIPS 2025 in San Diego in person and presented our paper.
🌏🇸🇬 2025/10 -- I gave an oral presentation for our OOPSLA paper in Singapore.
📃 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*)

[Pre3] Representation Transitions Reveal Emerging Safety Risks in Multi-Turn LLM Agents
Haoyu Wang, Wei Zhao, Yedi Zhang, Christopher M. Poskitt, Jun Sun
[J6] Synergizing LLMs and Formal Methods for Neural-Symbolic Reasoning
Jin Song Dong, Yufan Cai, Zhe Hou, Jing Sun, Hongshu Wang, Yedi Zhang, Xinyue Zuo
Communications of the ACM (CACM), Association for Computing Machinery, 2026. (Accepted)
[Pre2] SAFECLAW-R: Towards Safe and Secure Multi-agent Personal Assistants
Haoyu Wang, Zibo Xiao, Yedi Zhang*, Christopher M. Poskitt, Jun Sun
[C16] LLM-enabled Applications Require Systematic Threat Monitoring
Yedi Zhang, Haoyu Wang, Xianglin Yang, Jin Song Dong, Jun Sun
The Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2026. [CCF-A, CORE-A*] (Accepted)
[Pre1] 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
[C15] 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
IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2026. [Preprint] [Website] [CCF-A, CORE-A*]
[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. [Long Version] [CCF-A, CORE-A*]
[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 Version] [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 Version] [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 Version] [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 15th International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR 2027)
- The 35th ACM International Conference on the Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE 2027)
- The 49th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2027)
- The 40th Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2026), Position track
- The 33rd ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS 2026)
- The 38th International Conference on Computer Aided Verification (CAV 2026)
- The 17th International Conference on Internetware (Internetware 2026)
- The 20th International Symposium on Theoretical Aspects of Software Engineering (TASE 2026)
- The 14th International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR 2026)
- The 40th Annual AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2026)
- The 48th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2026)
- ChinaSoft 2025, Formal Methods and Applications track
- The 32nd Asia-Pacific Software Engineering Conference (APSEC 2025), Software Engineering in Practice (SEIP) track
- The 39th Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2025)
- The 33rd ACM International Conference on Multimedia (ACM'MM 2025)
- 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.
CSC-IBM Excellent Chinese Student Scholarship, 2019.
AAAI Travel Grant, 2019.
ICM Meritorious Winner, 2016.