Welcome to S4 Group!
Welcome to S4 group' blog! Our works are mainly focused on the theories, techniques and tools for making Complex Systems (such as Deep Learning Systems, Blockchain Systems, Cyber-Physical Systems, Quantum Systems, etc.) Safe, Secure and Smart.
More details of the group's research work can be found here.
Research Assistant Positions at Different Levels Available
We are currently looking for research assistants for the following 3 projects:
"Trustworthiness Guarantee of Deep Learning Systems"
"Key Technologies of Two-Layers Integrated Secure High Performance Blockchain Smart Contract Language"
"Mediator-based Protocol-oriented Modeling Language Design and Tool Implementation"
at postdoc/PhD level. The key criteria for the RA positions include good mathematical background and/or programming skills. The positions are available until the end of 2025 and applications for master students from international students are also welcome.
Undergraduate students from mathematics, computer science, information science or other related disciplines are also welcome to join my group for internship of research. Please feel free to contact me.
In the past years I have received many requests for (2-months or less) summer internships from undergraduate students (both from other universities in China and from other countries like India, Pakistan, etc,). However, due to administrative reasons I will not have such summer internships for students (I am usually out of the campus in July and August for conference trips and academic visits). If you just want to get a short summer research experience, please try other groups.
ChinaSoft 2022 at Shanghai (virtually), China
The 2022 CCF ChinaSoft Conference (ChinaSoft 2022) was held at Shanghai (virtually) from November 25 to 27, 2022. Meng Sun gave a keynote talk "Mutation Testing of Reinforcement Learning Systems" at the AI Security Track of the conference, and a talk "Mediator-based Protocol-oriented Modeling Language Design and Tool Implementation".
Details of the conference can be found here.
CSIAM 2022
The 20th Annual Conference of China Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (CSIAM 2022) was held online from November 17 to 20, 2022. Meng Sun gave a talk "Blockchain-Based Supply Chain Finance Design Patterns" at the session "Challenges on Theories, Technologies and Applications for Blockchains".
The programme of the conference can be found here.
Dr. Jingyi Wang's Talk at Our Group
Dr. Jingyi Wang from Zhejiang Univ. gave a talk "Copy, Right? A Testing Framework for Copyright Protection of Deep Learning Models" online on November 2, 2022.
Details of the talk can be found here.
Probabilistic Mediator: A Coalgebraic Perspective
The paper "Probabilistic Mediator: A Coalgebraic Perspective" by Ai Liu, Shaoying Liu and Meng Sun was published at Journal of Logical and Algebraic Methods in Programming, vol. 129, in the special section "Logic and Calculi for all, Essays Dedicated to Luís Soares Barbosa on the Occasion of His 60th Birthday".
Two papers published at SETTA 2022
The 8th International Symposium on Dependable Software Engineering, Theories, Tools, and Applications (SETTA 2022) was held virtually from October 27 to 29, 2022. We have two papers "HashC: Making DNNs' Coverage Testing Finer and Faster" and "MTUL: Towards Mutation Testing of Unsupervised Learning Systems" accepted by the conference. Weidi Sun and Yuteng Lu gave the corresponding talks at the conference.
The details of the conference can be found here.
ICFEM 2022
The 23rd International Conference on Formal Engineering Methods (ICFEM 2022) was held in Madrid, Spain, from October 24 to 27, 2022. The paper "Extracting Weighted Finite Automata from Recurrent Neural Networks for Natural Languages" by Zeming Wei, Xiyue Zhang and Meng Sun was accepted by the conference. Zeming Wei gave a talk virtually at the conference.
The details of the conference can be found here.
Prof. Shaowei Cai's Talk
Prof. Shaowei Cai from Institute of Software, CAS visited our group and gave a talk "SAT and SMT Solving: CDCL and CDCL(T)" on October 18, 2022.
Prof. Fu Song's Talk at Our Group
Prof. Fu Song from Shanghai Tech Univ. gave a talk "PoS4MPC: Automated Security Policy Synthesis for Secure Multi-party Computation" online on September 28, 2022.
Details of the talk can be found here.
DSA 2022
The 9th International Symposium on Dependable Systems and Their Applications (DSA 2022) was held virtually from August 4 to 5, 2022. The paper "RGChaser: A RL-Guided Fuzz and Mutation Testing Framework for Deep Learning Systems" by Yuteng Lu, Kaicheng Shao, Weidi Sun and Meng Sun was accepted by the conference.
The details of the conference can be found here.
Two papers published at JSA
The extended version of both papers at SETTA 2021 are published at the Journal of System Architecture.
A Unifying Logical Framework for Neural Networks
The work on a unifying logical framework for neural networks by Xiyue Zhang (PKU, moved to Oxford), Xiaohong Chen (UIUC) and Meng Sun (PKU) was accepted by ICTAC 2022. Xiyue Zhang gave an online talk "Towards a unifying logical framework for neural networks" at ICTAC conference in September, 2022. Meng Sun was invited to give a keynote talk "A Unifying Logic for Neural Networks" at the conference AILA 2022 in August, 2022.
Congratulations to Xiaoyu Yang!
Xiaoyu Yang has defended her Master thesis successfully on June 2, 2022.
Congratulations to Xiaoyu!
Congratulations to Xiyue Zhang!
Xiyue Zhang has defended her PhD thesis "Towards Trustworthiness Assurance of Deep Learning Systems with Certification Techniques" successfully on May 26, 2022, and was awarded as the Excellent PhD thesis at Peking University.
Congratulations to Xiyue!
Prof. Fei He's Talk at Our Group
Prof. Fei He from Tsinghua University gave a talk "Interference Relation-Guided SMT Solving for Multi-Threaded Program Verification" online on May 11, 2022.
Details of the talk can be found here.
Dr. Pengfei Yang's Talk at Our Group
Dr. Pengfei Yang from Institute of Software, CAS gave a talk "Robustness Analysis for DNNs from the Perspective of Model Learning" on April 14, 2022.
Details of the talk can be found here.
Prof. Lei Bu's Talk at Our Group
南京大学卜磊教授于2022年3月17日做线上报告"基于在线验证的实时系统运行时安全监控与控制生成"，具体报告信息在这里。
Dr. Yi Li's Talk at Our Group
Dr. Yi Li from Huawei gave a talk "Formal Methods in Real World" on March 9, 2022.
Prof. Yu Jiang's Talk at Our Group
清华大学姜宇教授于2022年3月9日做线上报告"数据库软件安全测试"，具体报告信息在这里。
Prof. Jun Sun's Talk at Our Group
Prof. Jun Sun from Singapore Management University gave a talk "Causality-based Neural Network Repair" online on March 2, 2022.
Details of the talk can be found here.
中国工业与应用数学学会金融科技与算法专委会（筹）首届年会
中国工业与应用数学学会金融科技与算法专委会（筹）首届年会于2022年1月8-9日在珠海召开，孙猛在本次年会做线上报告 “All the Scenes on Earth Fade——When Blockchain Embraces Formal Verification”，并被推选为专委会常务委员。
ChinaSoft 2021 at Beijing, China
The 2021 CCF ChinaSoft Conference (ChinaSoft 2021) was held in a hybrid model (both in-person at Beijing, China and virtually online) from December 24 to 26, 2021. Meng Sun gave a talk "Formal Modeling and Verification of Large-Scale DL Systems" at the conference, and organized the Forum on Formal Methods and Applications (FMAC) with Prof. Liqian Chen from NUDT together.
The FMAC Forum got the Best Academic Forum Award at the conference.
Details of the conference can be found here.
QRS 2021
The 21th IEEE International Symposium on Software Quality, Reliability, and Security (QRS 2021) was held in a hybrid model (both in-person at Haikou and virtually online) from December 6 to 10, 2021. Xiaokun Luan gave the talk "Modeling and Verification of CKB Consensus Protocol in Coq" online at the conference.
The details of the conference can be found here.
SETTA 2021
The 7th International Symposium on Dependable Software Engineering, Theories, Tools, and Applications (SETTA 2021) was held virtually from November 25 to 27, 2021. Weidi Sun and Yuteng Lu gave two talks "DeepGlobal: A Global Robustness Verifiable FNN Framework" and "Mutation Testing of Reinforcement Learning Systems" at the conference.
The details of the conference can be found here.
DS-FM 2021
The Doctoral Symposium at 24th International Symposium on Formal Methods (DS-FM 2021) was held virtually on November 20, 2021. Xiyue Zhang, Weidi Sun and Yuteng Lu gave three talks "Towards Trustworthiness Assurance of Deep Learning Systems", "Coverage Testing for DNNs" and "Mutation Testing of Machine Learning Systems" at the symposium.
The programme of the conference can be found here.
Prof. Zhiwu Xu's Talk at Our Group
Prof. Zhiwu Xu from Shenzhen University gave a talk "Extracting automata from neural networks using active learning" online on November 5, 2021.
Details of the talk can be found here.
Dr. Jianwen Li's Talk at Our Group
Dr. Jianwen Li from East China Normal University gave a talk "On-the-fly Synthesis for LTL over Finite Traces" online on October 28, 2021.
Details of the talk can be found here.
Prof. Zhenbang Chen's Talk at Our Group
Prof. Zhenbang Chen from NUDT gave a talk "Symbolic Execution Oriented Constraint Solving" online on October 21, 2021.
Details of the talk can be found here.
Prof. Min Zhang's Talk at Our Group
Prof. Min Zhang from East China Normal University gave a talk "Linear Approximation Approaches for Formal Verification of Deep Neural Networks and Their Tightness" online on October 14, 2021.
Details of the talk can be found here.
Dr. Mingshuai Chen's Talk at Our Group
Dr. Mingshuai Chen from RWTH Aachen University, Germany, gave a talk "Latticed k-Induction with an Application to Probabilistic Programs" online on October 11, 2021.
Details of the talk can be found here.
CSIAM 2021 at Hefei, China
The 19th Annual Conference of China Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (CSIAM 2021) was held at Hefei, China from October 7 to 10, 2021. Meng Sun gave a talk "Modeling and Verification of CKB Consensus Protocol in Coq" at the session "Challenges on Theories, Technologies and Applications for Blockchains".
The programme of the conference can be found here.
陈霄泓博士报告
伊利诺伊大学香槟分校陈霄泓博士于2021年9月30日线上报告"K程序语言框架的可信化"，具体报告信息在这里。
Prof. Guangdong Bai's Talk at Our Group
Prof. Guangdong Bai from the University of Queensland, Australia, gave a talk "Identifying Privacy Weaknesses from IoT Trigger-action Platforms" online on September 23, 2021.
Details of the talk can be found here.
Prof. Fu Song's Talk at Our Group
Prof. Fu Song from Shanghai Tech University gave a talk "BDD4BNN: A BDD-Based Quantitative Analysis Framework for Binarized Neural Networks" online on September 16, 2021.
Details of the talk can be found here.
CSIAM-BTAF 2021 at Suzhou, China
The CSIAM Blockchain Technology and Applications Forum (CSIAM-BTAF 2021) was held at Suzhou, China from July 9 to 11, 2021. Meng Sun was invited to give a talk "All the Scenes on Earth Fade——When Blockchain Embraces Formal Verification".
The details of the forum can be found here.
Trustworthy AI Forum 2021 at Nanjing, China
The Trustworthy AI Summit Forum was held at Nanjing, China from July 9 to 10, 2021. Xiyue Zhang was invited to give a talk "Characterizing Adversarial Defects on Deep Learning Software from the Lens of Uncertainty".
The details of the forum can be found here.
SEKE 2021 at Pittsburgh, USA (Virtual)
The 33rd International Conference on Software Engineering & Knowledge Engineering (SEKE 2021) was held at Pittsburgh, USA, virtually from July 1 to 10, 2021. Xiaokun Luan, Yi-Chun Feng and Yuteng Lu gave three talks online at the conference.
The details of the conference can be found here.
Congratulations to Qi Zhang & Yi-Chun Feng!
The master students Qi Zhang and Yi-Chun Feng have defended their theis successfully. Congratulations to them!
AAAI 2021
The paper "Decision-Guided Weighted Automata Extraction from Recurrent Neural Networks" by Xiyue Zhang, Xiaoning Du, Xiaofei Xie, Lei Ma, Yang Liu and Meng Sun was accepted by AAAI 2021. The conference was held virtually on February 2-9, 2021. Details about the conference could be found here.