Youwei Zhong

First-year PhD student in Computer Science at Yale University

Member of the Rigorous Software Engineering (ROSE) group led by Prof. Ruzica Piskac

Formal Methods, Zero-Knowledge Proof

I received my Bachelor's degree in Computer Science and graduated as a member of the first class of John Hopcroft Class (John Class) at Zhiyuan College, Shanghai Jiao Tong University in 2025. There, I was introduced to research in Formal Verification by Prof. Qinxiang Cao.

During my undergraduate, I was a visiting student at Yale University. I'm fortunate to work on Zero-Knowledge Circuit Optimization with Prof. Ruzica Piskac and Research Scientist Timos Antonopoulos at Yale, and Prof. Ning Luo at UIUC. Before that, I was fortunate to be advised by Prof. Yu Feng and Dr. Yanju Chen at UCSB in developing bug finders for Zero-Knowledge Circuits and Zero-Knowledge Virtual Machines.

You can reach me by youwei[DOT]zhong[AT]yale[DOT]edu or by youwei[AT]ywzh[DOT]org (9854 DF14 ED06 789C)

CV  /  X (Twitter)  /  Github

profile photo

News

🎉 April 2025: I will be a Ph.D. student at Yale University starting in the fall of 2025!
🎉 October 2024: My paper A Parameterized Framework for the Formal Verification of Zero-Knowledge Virtual Machines received the 2nd place in the OOPSLA 2024 SRC!

Publication

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

🥈 The 2nd Place Winner in the Student Research Competition

This paper first proposed 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 Verification Framework for the Constraint Generation Algorithms in Zero-Knowledge Virtual Machines
Youwei Zhong, Zihan Xu, Yuncong Hu, Xiang Xie, Yu Yu, Qinxiang Cao

This paper is an extension work based on my OOPSLA'24 SRC paper.
We formalize the cryptographic security properties of zkVMs in the Coq proof assistant, including soundness, completeness, knowledge soundness, and zero-knowledge, by formalizing probabilistic programs using monads.

Awards and Honors

    🥈 The 2nd Place Winner in OOPSLA 2024 SRC (300 USD)
    🏆 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, 2024
    🏆 Three Good Student of Shanghai Jiao Tong University (one person per class per year), 2022, 2023, 2024
    🥇 A-class Academic Excellence Scholarship, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, 2024

Last updated on 2025-9-6.
The source code of this website is modified from Jon Barron's personal website.