Yifeng (Ethan) Xiao

Hi there! It’s Yifeng (Ethan). I am currently an EECS Ph.D. student at the University of California, Berkeley (UCB), advised by Prof. Pierluigi Nuzzo.

🤖 Cyber-physical systems (CPS), such as smart grids, autonomous robots, and multi-agent platforms, face design challenges due to coupling of physical dynamics, decision-making, and requirements on safety, scalability, and performance. The same questions increasingly arise for AI agents that take real actions in the world.

My research addresses these challenges at the intersection of formal methods, neurosymbolic AI, and game theory, with a focus on the design, verification, and synthesis of systems that can reason, adapt, and coordinate under structured constraints.

I received my B.E. in Microelectronic Science and Engineering from Fudan University (復旦大學). I was fortunate to work with Prof. Jianli Chen and Prof. Bei Yu on machine learning-based applications in electronic design automation (EDA).

💬 Happy to chat about research, startups, or what I’m building. Feel free to reach out, or book 30 minutes with a quick note on what you’d like to discuss.

News

May 13, 2026	Paper “Contract-Based Architecture Exploration for Efficient Cyber-Physical System Design” accepted at the FORCE 2026 workshop, co-located with CAV 2026 at FLoC in Lisbon, Portugal! 🎉
Mar 18, 2026	Awarded the DATE 2026 Young People Programme Fellowship to attend DATE 2026 – Design, Automation and Test in Europe in Verona, Italy (20–22 April 2026). 🎉
Mar 02, 2026	Paper on agentified benchmarking for logical reasoning agents accepted at ICLR 2026 Workshop on AI in the Wild (AIWILD)! ✨

Selected Publications

DATE

Contract-Based Architecture Exploration of Cyber-Physical Systems via Satisfiability Modulo Convex Programming

Yifeng Xiao and Pierluigi Nuzzo

In IEEE Design, Automation & Test in Europe Conference & Exhibition (DATE), 2026

Bib

@inproceedings{xiao2026contract,
  title = {Contract-Based Architecture Exploration of Cyber-Physical Systems via Satisfiability Modulo Convex Programming},
  author = {Xiao, Yifeng and Nuzzo, Pierluigi},
  booktitle = {IEEE Design, Automation \& Test in Europe Conference \& Exhibition (DATE)},
  year = {2026},
  organization = {IEEE},
}

CDC

Incentive Design for Safe Nash Equilibrium Learning in Large Populations via Control Barrier Functions

Yifeng Xiao, Jair Certorio, Nuno C. Martins, and 2 more authors

In IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC), 2025

Bib HTML Slides

@inproceedings{xiao2025incentive,
  title = {Incentive Design for Safe Nash Equilibrium Learning in Large Populations via Control Barrier Functions},
  author = {Xiao, Yifeng and Certorio, Jair and Martins, Nuno C. and Shoukry, Yasser and Nuzzo, Pierluigi},
  booktitle = {IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC)},
  year = {2025},
  organization = {IEEE},
}

DATE

Efficient Exploration of Cyber-Physical System Architectures Using Contracts and Subgraph Isomorphism

Yifeng Xiao, Chanwook Oh, Michele Lora, and 1 more author

In IEEE Design, Automation & Test in Europe Conference & Exhibition (DATE), 2024

Awarded Bib HTML Slides

Best Paper Award

@inproceedings{xiao2024efficient,
  title = {Efficient Exploration of Cyber-Physical System Architectures Using Contracts and Subgraph Isomorphism},
  author = {Xiao, Yifeng and Oh, Chanwook and Lora, Michele and Nuzzo, Pierluigi},
  booktitle = {IEEE Design, Automation \& Test in Europe Conference \& Exhibition (DATE)},
  year = {2024},
  organization = {IEEE},
}

Honors and Awards

Best Paper Award , Design Automation and Test Conference in Europe 2024 (4/996) 2024
DAC Young Fellowship , Design Automation Conference 2023
Outstanding Graduates of Shanghai , Shanghai Municipal Government (2nd place of 122) 2020
National IC Design Competition - First Prize for Undergraduate Group , National IC Design Competition 2019
Undergraduate Excellence Scholarship of FDU , Fudan University 2018
SCSK Corporation Scholarship , SCSK Corporation (1/122) 2018