Yifeng Xiao

Hi there! It’s Yifeng (Ethan). I am currently a 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.

My research addresses these challenges by integrating optimization, learning-based models, and game-theoretic reasoning with formal methods for design automation of CPS 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).

I’m always happy to discuss my research, explore startup ideas, collaborate, and mentor self-motivated students. 💬 Feel free to reach out!

News

Dec 11, 2025	Talk at IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC) 2025: “Incentive Design for Safe Nash Equilibrium Learning in Large Populations via Control Barrier Functions” 🎤
Dec 08, 2025	Paper on contract-based architecture exploration accepted at DATE 2026! 🎉
Aug 22, 2025	Completed summer internship at Amazon Web Services developing LLM-based Infrastructure-as-Code frameworks.

Selected Publications

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 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},
}

DAC

Low-Cost Lithography Hotspot Detection with Active Entropy Sampling and Model Calibration

Yifeng Xiao, Miaodi Su, Haoyu Yang, and 3 more authors

In IEEE Design Automation Conference (DAC), 2021

Bib HTML

@inproceedings{xiao2021low,
  title = {Low-Cost Lithography Hotspot Detection with Active Entropy Sampling and Model Calibration},
  author = {Xiao, Yifeng and Su, Miaodi and Yang, Haoyu and Chen, Jianli and Yu, Jun and Yu, Bei},
  booktitle = {IEEE Design Automation Conference (DAC)},
  year = {2021},
  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