Zichen (Grayson) Xie

graysonxie@virginia.edu

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I am a second-year CS Ph.D. student at the University of Virginia (UVA), advised by Prof. Wenxi Wang. I earned my bachelor’s degree from Zhejiang University (ZJU), where I was fortunate to work with Prof. Lingming Zhang and Prof. Shouling Ji.

I am a member of the Advanced Honor Class for Engineering Education (ACEE) in Chu Kochen Honors College.

My research interests lie in Software Engineering, Software Security, and Machine Learning, with a focus on Verifiable Code Generation and Diffusion Models.

To date, my work has uncovered more than 150 previously unknown bugs in open-source projects, including Apache Druid and Netty, as well as 92 bugs in the Linux Kernel.

news

Nov 03, 2026 🏆 The VeriContest leaderboard is live and open for submissions!

selected publications

  1. NeurIPS 2026
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    VeriContest: A Competitive-Programming Benchmark for Verifiable Code Generation
    Zichen Xie, Mrigank Pawagi, Yuxin Liu, Aaditi Rai, Lize Shao, John Berberian Jr, Sicong Che, and Wenxi Wang
    arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.08553, 2026
  2. Preprint 2026
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    Self-Decomposing Diffusion for Code Generation
    Lize Shao, Zichen Xie, Zhizhen Chen, Zhe Zeng, and Wenxi Wang
    arXiv preprint arXiv:2610.27600, 2026
  3. Preprint 2026
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    Detecting Inconsistencies in Model Specifications with LLM-as-Verifier Reasoning
    Zichen Xie, Mrigank Pawagi, Lize Shao, Yang Hu, and Wenxi Wang
    arXiv preprint arXiv:2610.01847, 2026
  4. NeurIPS 2026
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    Constrained Code Generation with Discrete Diffusion
    Lize Shao, Michael Cardei, Zichen Xie, Ferdinando Fioretto, and Wenxi Wang
    arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.16829, 2026
  5. ICML 2026
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    Can LLMs Reason Like Automated Theorem Provers for Rust Verification? VCoT-Bench: Evaluating via Verification Chain of Thought
    Zichen Xie, and Wenxi Wang
    arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.18334, 2026
  6. SOSP 2025
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    KNighter: Transforming Static Analysis with LLM-Synthesized Checkers
    Chenyuan Yang, Zijie Zhao, Zichen Xie, Haoyu Li, and Lingming Zhang
    In Proceedings of the ACM SIGOPS 31st Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, 2025

internships

Apr. 2025 - May 2025 NetEase Games, ThunderFire, Software Engineer
Jul. 2024 - Sept. 2024 Tencent CDG, Wechat Ads, Software Engineer