VLDB 2026 Research / reviewers in the wild / expert
Yuyou Fan
dblp:229/5628
· DBLP profile ↗
4ranked-venue papers
1as first author
3since 2021 · last 2026
0009-0005-5742-0692ORCID · corroborated
Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several
Software engineering, systems software and programming languages · 4 · 1 first-author · 3 since 2021Artificial intelligence and machine learning · 1Systems, architecture and hardware · 1 · 1 first-author · 1 since 2021
| Year | Publication | Venue | Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2026 | Nice to Meet You: Synthesizing Practical MLIR Abstract TransformersabstractStatic analyses play a fundamental role during compilation: they discover facts that are true in all executions of the code being compiled, and then these facts are used to justify optimizations and diagnostics. Each static analysis is based on a collection of abstract transformers that provide abstract semantics for the concrete instructions that make up a program. It can be challenging to implement abstract transformers that are sound, precise, and efficient—and in fact both LLVM and GCC have suffered from miscompilations caused by unsound abstract transformers. Moreover, even after more than 20 years of development, LLVM lacks abstract transformers for hundreds of instructions in its intermediate representation (IR). We developed NiceToMeetYou : a program synthesis framework for abstract transformers that are aimed at the kinds of non-relational integer abstract domains that are heavily used by today’s production compilers. It exploits a simple but novel technique for breaking the synthesis problem into parts: each of our transformers is the meet of a collection of simpler, sound transformers that are synthesized such that each new piece fills a gap in the precision of the final transformer. Our design point is bulk automation: no sketches are required. Transformers are verified by lowering to a previously-created SMT dialect of MLIR. Each of our synthesized transformers is provably sound and some (17 %) are more precise than those provided by LLVM. Xuanyu Peng, Dominic Kennedy, Yuyou Fan, Ben Greenman, John Regehr, Loris D'Antoni |
Proc. ACM Program. Lang. | 3 |
| 2025 | First-Class Verification Dialects for MLIRabstractMLIR is a toolkit supporting the development of extensible and composable intermediate representations (IRs) called dialects ; it was created in response to rapid changes in hardware platforms, programming languages, and application domains such as machine learning. MLIR supports development teams creating compilers and compiler-adjacent tools by factoring out common infrastructure such as parsers and printers. A major limitation of MLIR is that it is syntax-focused: it has no support for directly encoding the semantics of operations in its dialects. Thus, at present, the parts of MLIR tools that depend on semantics—optimizers, analyzers, verifiers, transformers—must all be engineered by hand. Our work makes formal semantics a first-class citizen in the MLIR ecosystem. We designed and implemented a collection of semantics-supporting MLIR dialects for encoding the semantics of compiler IRs. These dialects support a separation of concerns between three domains of expertise when building formal-methods-based tooling for compilers. First, compiler developers define their dialect’s semantics as a lowering (compilation transformation) from their dialect to one or more of ours. Second, SMT solver experts provide tools to optimize domain-specific high-level semantics and lower them to SMT queries. Third, tool builders create dialect-independent verification tools. We validate our work by defining semantics for five key MLIR dialects, defining a state-of-the-art SMT encoding for memory-based semantics, and building three dialect-agnostic tools, which we used to find five miscompilation bugs in upstream MLIR, verify a canonicalization pass, and also formally verify transfer functions for two dataflow analyses: “known bits” (that finds individual bits that are always zero or one in all executions) and “demanded bits” (that finds don't-care bits). The transfer functions that we verify are improved versions of those in upstream MLIR; they detect on average 36.6% more known bits in real-world MLIR programs compared to the upstream implementation. Mathieu Fehr, Yuyou Fan, Hugo Pompougnac, John Regehr, Tobias Grosser |
Proc. ACM Program. Lang. | 2 |
| 2024 | High-Throughput, Formal-Methods-Assisted Fuzzing for LLVMabstractIt is very difficult to thoroughly test a compiler, and as a consequence it is common for released versions of production compilers to contain bugs that cause them to crash and to emit incorrect object code. We created alive-mutate, a mutation-based fuzzing tool that takes test cases written by humans and randomly modifies them, based on the hypothesis that while compiler developers are fundamentally good at writing tests, they also tend to miss corner cases. Alive-mutate is integrated with the Alive2 translation validation tool for LLVM, which is useful because it checks the behavior of optimizations for all possible values of input variables. Alive-mutate is also integrated with the LLVM middle-end, allowing it to perform mutations, optimizations, and formal verification of the optimizations all within a single program—avoiding numerous sources of overhead. Alive-mutate's fuzzing throughput is 12x higher, on average, than a fuzzing workflow that runs mutation, optimization, and formal verification in separate processes. So far we have used alive-mutate to find and report 33 previously unknown bugs in LLVM. Yuyou Fan, John Regehr |
CGO | 1 |
| 2018 | Finding Shilling Attack in Recommender System based on Dynamic Feature SelectionabstractRecommender system is widely used as an important tool in various fields for effectively dealing with information overload, and collaborative filtering algorithm plays a vital role in the system.However, such system is highly vulnerable to malicious attacks, especially shilling attack because of data openness and independence.Therefore, detecting shilling attack has become an important issue to ensure the security of recommender system.Most of existing methods for detecting shilling attack are based on rating classification features and their limitation is that they are easily to be interfered by obfuscation techniques.Moreover, traditional detection algorithms can not handle multiple types of shilling attack flexibly.In order to solve these problems, in this paper, we propose an outlier degree shilling attack detection algorithm based on dynamic feature selection.By considering the differences of user choosing items and taking user popularity as a detection metric, as well as using information entropy to select detection metrics dynamically, a variety of shilling attack models can be dealt with flexibly.Experiments show that the algorithm has stronger detection performance and interference immunity in shilling attack detection. Gaofeng Cao, Yuyou Fan, Li Kuang |
SEKE | 3 |