Zhouxing Shi

Assistant Professor at UC Riverside

I am an Assistant Professor at Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of California, Riverside. I completed Ph.D. at UCLA Computer Science Department in 2025, advised by Prof. Cho-Jui Hsieh. I received my B.Eng. degree from the CST department at Tsinghua University in 2020.

My research focus is on machine learning (ML), especially developing more trustworthy and reliable AI models. Specifically, some of my current interests include but are not limited to: the interplay between generative AI, verifiers and formal methods; robustness and safety for state-of-the-art ML models; formal verification for ML; training verifiable ML models with guarantees; applications of verifiable ML in mission-critical scenarios.

Prospective Students: I am actively looking for motivated students to join my group, including prospective Ph.D. students (Fall 2026 admission), current undergraduates or Master’s students at UCR, or interns/collaborators/visitors. Please see this page and reach out by email.

Selected Publications (* Equal contribution)

Neural Network Verification with Branch-and-Bound for General Nonlinearities
Lyapunov-stable Neural Control for State and Output Feedback: A Novel Formulation
Defending LLMs against Jailbreaking Attacks via Backtranslation
Red Teaming Language Model Detectors with Language Models
Effective Robustness against Natural Distribution Shifts for Models with Different Training Data
Fast Certified Robust Training with Short Warmup
Automatic Perturbation Analysis for Scalable Certified Robustness and Beyond

Awards

  • UCLA Dissertation Year Award (fellowship), 2024-2025
  • Amazon Fellowship (Amazon & UCLA Science Hub fellowship), 2022-2023
  • 4X first-place winner at the International Verification of Neural Networks Competition (VNN-COMP), 2021-2024