FORMALCERT-AI

Formal methods.
Intelligent systems.

We study how learned systems can come with meaningful guarantees—from certificate synthesis and statistical certification to monitoring during deployment.

RESEARCH PROJECT · 2026 · WORKING PAPER

Runtime Barrier Monitoring

Anytime-Valid Runtime Monitoring of Learned Barrier Certificates

Zhipeng Cao, Taoran Wu, Weiru Cui, Luke Ong, Bai Xue

Auditing learned barrier certificates from observed trajectories, with anytime-valid false-alarm control under the conditional barrier-drift assumption.

Framework from the runtime monitoring paper: a learned barrier and controller, an online e-process monitor, alarms, and trajectory buffering

RESEARCH PROJECT · 2026

LLM2Cert

LLM Synthesis of Certificates with SMT/Lean Verification

Zhipeng Cao*, Peiyang Song*, Nikolaus Vertovec, Weiru Cui, Zhihao Yang, Mingkang Liu, Luxia Lin, Bai Xue†, Alessandro Abate†

* Equal contribution. † Equal advising.

Lyapunov functions, barrier certificates, and feedback policies for stability, region of attraction, forward invariance, and safety.

Includes DynaCertBench: 105 problems spanning literature-derived, extended, and newly constructed systems.

Overview of LLM2Cert's certificate synthesis and SMT/Lean verification pipeline

NEW PROJECT · 2026 · PREPRINT

Statistical Barrier Certification

Statistical Certification of Neural Barrier Functions for invariance and Reach-Avoidance in Learning-Enabled Systems

Zhipeng Cao, Nikolaus Vertovec, Luke Ong, Taoran Wu, Bai Xue

Joint policy–barrier learning followed by independent PAC certification. Explore how a certified region’s size relates to its multi-step guarantee.

A schematic certified region and the learning-to-certification pipeline

SELECTED WORK

Publications

Research on formal guarantees for intelligent and dynamical systems.

Code and data

The LLM2Cert repository contains the implementation, benchmark, recorded model outputs, and experiment reproduction instructions.

The statistical certification project currently hosts the manuscript, with implementation updates to follow.