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 LLM-based AI agents that take real actions in the world.

My research addresses these challenges at the intersection of formal methods, 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