I am a final-year CS PhD student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, advised by Somesh Jha. In the past, I was advised by Ben Liblit. I am affliated with the fantasitic madPL group. I have also been fortunately mentored by Thomas Reps, Aws Albarghouthi and Yudong Chen.

My research lies at the intersection of programming languages and deep learning. It stems from formalizing the computational phonomena in deep learning (We CS folks call formalizing abstracting; physicists would call it modeling), with an emphasis on analyzing the variational properties of neural networks. My research style is greatly influenced by Immanuel Kant and the classical Göttingen school of mathematicians. Currently, I am working on the homotopy method for large language models testing and analysis.

I studied mathematics and philosophy at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign as an undergraduate. I also completed a master degree in computer science at the Courant Institute, New York University, before moving to Madison. At New York University, my research advisor was Richard Cole.

The best way to reach me is my email: “MyInitials (two letters) at cs.wisc.edu” (for example, pl@cs.wisc.edu).

Publications and manuscripts

Zi Wang, Divyam Anshumaan, Ashish Hooda, Yudong Chen and Somesh Jha. Relaying Jailbreaks by Unlearning Model Alignment. Under Review

Zi Wang, Somesh Jha and Krishnamurthy (Dj) Dvijotham. Algebraic Neural-network Analysis. Under Review

Zi Wang, Bin Hu, Aaron Havens, Alexandre Araujo, Yang Zheng, Yudong Chen and Somesh Jha. On the Scalability and Memory Efficiency of Semidefinite Programs for Lipschitz Constant Estimation of Neural Networks. ICLR 2024

Zi Wang, Gautam Prakriya and Somesh Jha. A Quantitative Geometric Approach to Neural Network Smoothness. NeurIPS 2022

Zi Wang, Aws Albarghouthi, Gautam Prakriya and Somesh Jha. Interval Universal Approximation for Neural Networks. POPL 2022

Jordan Henkel, Goutham Ramakrishnan, Zi Wang, Aws Albarghouthi, Somesh Jha and Thomas Reps. Semantic Robustness of Models of Source Code. SANER 2022

Thomas K. Panum, Zi Wang, Pengyu Kan, Earlence Fernandes and Somesh Jha. Exploring Adversarial Robustness of Deep Metric Learning. arXiv preprint arXiv:2102.07265

Zi Wang, Ben Liblit and Thomas Reps. TOFU: Target-Oriented FUzzer. arXiv preprint arXiv:2004.14375

Zi Wang, Jihye Choi, Ke Wang and Somesh Jha. Rethinking Diversity in Deep Neural Network Testing. arXiv:2305.15698

Zi Wang. A New Strongly Polynomial Algorithm for Computing Fisher Market Equilibria with Spending Constraint Utilities. Master Thesis

Miscellaneous

My recent favorite album is RENAISSANCE. Great ideas will come back again and again 🫡.

My MOST favorite movie is Life of Pi. Life is full of metaphors, and the archetypes underneath the metaphors are the innate abstractions of the world.