Youwei Zhong

I am a senior undergraduate of John Hopcroft Class (John Class) at Zhiyuan College, Shanghai Jiao Tong University.

Currently, I'm a visiting student at Yale University. I'm fortunate to work with Prof. Ruzica Piskac and Research Scientist Timos Antonopoulos at Yale, and Prof. Ning Luo at UIUC. We are working on the optimization of zero-knowledge circuits.

Previously, I was fortunate to be advised by Prof. Yu Feng and Dr. Yanju Chen, and collaborate with Prof. Ranjit Jhala in developing bug finders for zero-knowledge virtual machines using the Flux refinement type checker. I also developed an analyzer for Circom, a domain specific language for zero-knowledge circuits.

Before that, I was fortunate to be advised by Prof. Qinxiang Cao and Prof. Yuncong Hu. We worked on formal verification of zero-knowledge virtual machines, using the Coq proof assistant, with a paper accepted by OOPSLA'24 SRC and a manuscript under revision.

🎉 I recently won the 2nd place in the OOPSLA 2024 SRC!

🌟 I'm currently applying for a Ph.D. position starting in the fall of 2025! If you are interested in recruiting me, please feel free to contact me!

You can reach me by youwei[AT]ywzh[DOT]org

9854 DF14 ED06 789C

CV  /  Twitter  /  Github

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Research

I'm currently interested in Formal Verification and Zero-Knowledge Proof. Specifically, I enjoy constructing significant prototypes in code which also have theoretical values. I'd also like to explore fields like Program Analysis, compilers, Program Synthesis, Functional Programming, and other areas related to Programming Languages.

Publication

A Parameterized Framework for the Formal Verification of Zero-Knowledge Virtual Machines
Youwei Zhong
OOPSLA 2024

🥈 The 2nd Place Winner in the Student Research Competition

This paper introduces a parameterized framework for the formal verification of zkVMs in Coq. We prove the soundness and completeness of the constraint generation algorithm from machine instructions to semantics-level constraints. Existing works target specific zkVMs, and require repeated proof work in this phase, whereas our proofs are parameterized and can be reused in development and by all zkVMs. We also demonstrate the generality of our framework by instantiation on two examples: Cairo VM and a simplified zkEVM.

Manuscript

A Parameterized Framework for the Formal Verification of Zero-Knowledge Virtual Machines
Youwei Zhong, Zihan Xu, Yuncong Hu, Xiang Xie, Yu Yu, Qinxiang Cao
revision in progress

This paper is an extension work based on my OOPSLA'24 SRC paper with the same name.

Awards and Honors

    🥈 The 2nd Place Winner in OOPSLA 2024 SRC
    🏆 Longfor Scholarship (10’000 yuan, 10 winners each year, Zhiyuan College), 2022
    🏆 Zhiyuan Honorary Scholarship (5’000 yuan per year, Top 5%, Shanghai Jiao Tong University), 2021, 2022, 2023
    🏆 Three Good Student of Shanghai Jiao Tong University (one person per class per year), 2022, 2023, 2024

Last updated on 2024-11-18.
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