The PLSE Group

Programming Languages and Software Engineering

About Us

We are a research group led by Professor Yu Feng. The group started at UC Santa Barbara and now has members at UCLA and UC San Diego as well. We build automated reasoning tools at the intersection of programming languages, formal verification, and security, rooted in program synthesis, type theory, and constraint solving. A unifying theme is combining logical reasoning with learning to push the frontier of what automated tools can guarantee.

UC Santa BarbaraUCLAUC San Diego

Current Work

  1. Formal methods and security for AI agents, ensuring autonomous systems behave safely and correctly through verification and runtime guarantees.
  2. Compilers and verifiers for zero-knowledge proof circuits, with tools such as Tabby and Tessel that detect vulnerabilities and optimize performance in ZK systems deployed in production.
  3. Smart contract and DeFi security, including attack synthesis and state-inconsistency detection.
  4. Synthesis-driven tools for end-user programming, such as data visualization and code transpilation.

News

  • Automated Safety Analysis for Agentic Workflows accepted to ICSE 2027.
  • Revealing Semantic Gaps in Zero-Knowledge Virtual Machines via Obligation-Targeted Semantic Fuzzing accepted to NDSS 2027.
  • Junrui Liu joins Cal Poly as an Assistant Professor of Computer Science. Congratulations!
  • Thunderbolt: Fast Asynchronous Off-Chain Bitcoin Transfers accepted to CCS 2026.
  • Tabby, a synthesis-aided compiler for high-performance zero-knowledge proof circuits, appears at OOPSLA 2025.
  • Yanju Chen starts as a postdoctoral scholar at UC San Diego.
  • Yu Feng receives an Ethereum Academic Award for the third year in a row.
  • Two papers at CCS 2024: Foray and AuthSaber.
  • Certifying Zero-Knowledge Circuits with Refinement Types appears at IEEE S&P 2024, and ZKAP at USENIX Security 2024.
  • Refinement Types for Visualization appears at ASE 2024.
  • Two papers at PLDI 2023: Picus and conflict-driven synthesis for layout engines.
  • Yanju Chen completes the Ph.D. with the thesis Deduction-Powered Neural Program Synthesis: A Synergistic Perspective.
  • Visualization Question Answering Using Introspective Program Synthesis wins a Distinguished Paper Award at PLDI 2022.
  • SolType appears at POPL 2022, Sailfish at IEEE S&P 2022, and Hecate at ASPLOS 2022.
  • Falx wins a Best Paper Award at CHI 2021.
  • Yu Feng receives a Google Faculty Research Award.
  • Summary-Based Symbolic Evaluation for Smart Contracts wins a Distinguished Paper Award at ASE 2020.

People

Faculty

Postdocs

Ph.D. Students

Alumni

Featured Publications

All publications