Yifeng (Ethan) Xiao

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

🤖 My research is on neurosymbolic AI: combining formal methods, machine learning, and game theory to design, verify, and synthesize systems that act in the world, from hardware design and cyber-physical systems (such as smart grids and robotics) to AI agents. I lead the development of CHASE, an open-source contract-based design toolkit that is the symbolic backbone of this work. Alongside my research, I co-founded a stealth startup that brings these ideas to production AI agents.

I received my B.E. in Microelectronic Science and Engineering from Fudan University (復旦大學), where I worked with Prof. Jianli Chen and Prof. Bei Yu on machine learning for electronic design automation (EDA).

💬 I enjoy connecting with researchers, engineers, and founders working on related problems, and I am open to collaborations and new opportunities. Feel free to reach out, or book 30 minutes with a quick note on what you’d like to discuss.

News

Oct 29, 2026	Gave a virtual presentation of ACIES at the REALM 2026 workshop at EMNLP 2026. The paper is now available in the ACL Anthology! 🎤
Oct 09, 2026	Presented our paper on contract-based consistency and availability analysis for distributed cyber-physical systems at MEMOCODE 2026, part of ESWEEK 2026 in Barcelona, Spain! 🎤
Sep 08, 2026	Paper “ACIES: A Self-Evolving Agentic Contract-Based Framework for Cyber-Physical System Control Synthesis” accepted at the REALM 2026 workshop, co-located with EMNLP 2026 in Budapest, Hungary! 🎉

Selected Publications

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},
  pinned = {true},
}

arXiv

Symbolic Temporal Supervision of LLM Agents Using Contracts

Yifeng Xiao and Pierluigi Nuzzo

arXiv preprint arXiv:2609.18128, Sep 2026

arXiv Bib

@article{xiao2026symbolic,
  title = {Symbolic Temporal Supervision of {LLM} Agents Using Contracts},
  author = {Xiao, Yifeng and Nuzzo, Pierluigi},
  journal = {arXiv preprint arXiv:2609.18128},
  year = {2026},
  month = sep,
}

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},
}

Honors and Awards

Best Paper Award , Design Automation and Test Conference in Europe 2024 (Top 0.4% of submissions) 2024
DAC Young Fellowship , Design Automation Conference 2023
Outstanding Graduates of Shanghai , Shanghai Municipal Government (Top 2%) 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 (Top 1%) 2018