Ziyan An

Vanderbilt University, Department of Computer Science. 1025 16th Ave S, Nashville, TN 37212

(863) 303-2399

ziyan.an AT vanderbilt DOT edu

I am a fourth-year Ph.D. student in Computer Science at Vanderbilt University, where I have been awarded the Dean’s Graduate Fellowship. I am very fortunate to have the guidance and mentorship of Prof. Meiyi Ma as my advisor.

My primary research interest lies in the design of AI-based systems that integrate formal specifications and leverage prior knowledge. By combining these elements, I aim to develop advanced AI solutions that are more robust, reliable, explainable, and capable of addressing real-world challenges effectively. Another central theme of my work is enhancing the explainability of AI-driven decisions, ensuring that complex systems remain transparent and trustworthy to the people who rely on them.

Prior to joining Vanderbilt University, I earned my B.S. in Computer Science from New York University. During my academic journey, I had the invaluable opportunity to intern at Sunthetics, UiPath, and Uber as an AI and Machine Learning software engineer. Additionally, I was an undergraduate research assistant at AI4CE Lab at NYU, under the mentorship of Prof. Chen Feng, where I worked on projects in computer vision.

Publications

A selection of representative publications. See the full list of publications for all of my work.

  1. LogiEx: Integrating Formal Logic and LLMs for Explainable Transit Planning
    Ziyan An, Xia Wang, Hendrik Baier, Zhenyuan Chen, Abhishek Dubey, Taylor T. Johnson, Jonathan Sprinkle, and Meiyi Ma
    In Proceedings of the 17th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Cyber-Physical Systems 2026
  2. Multi-agent reinforcement learning guided by signal temporal logic specifications
    Jiangwei Wang, Shuo Yang, Ziyan An, Songyang Han, Zhili Zhang, Rahul Mangharam, Meiyi Ma, and Fei Miao
    In 2025 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems 2025
  3. Combining LLMs with Logic-Based Framework to Explain MCTS
    Ziyan An, Xia Wang, Hendrik Baier, Zhenyuan Chen, Abhishek Dubey, Taylor T. Johnson, Jonathan Sprinkle, and Meiyi Ma
    In The 24th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems 2025
  4. Formal Logic-Guided Harnessing Heterogeneous Fairness Rules in Smart Cities
    Ziyan An, Yiqi Zhao, Xuqing Gao, Ayan Mukhopadhyay, and Meiyi Ma
    ACM Transactions on Cyber-Physical Systems 2025
  5. ISL: Monitoring Image Segmentation Logic in Medical Imaging Analysis
    Ziyan An, Daniel Moyer, Ipek Oguz, Taylor T. Johnson, and Meiyi Ma
    In International Conference on Runtime Verification 2025
  6. Formal Logic Enabled Personalized Federated Learning Through Property Inference
    Ziyan An, Taylor T. Johnson, and Meiyi Ma
    In Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence 2024
  7. Runtime monitoring of accidents in driving recordings with multi-type logic in empirical models
    Ziyan An, Xia Wang, Taylor T. Johnson, Jonathan Sprinkle, and Meiyi Ma
    In International Conference on Runtime Verification 2023
  8. V2X-Sim: Multi-agent collaborative perception dataset and benchmark for autonomous driving
    Yiming Li, Dekun Ma, Ziyan An, Zixun Wang, Yiqi Zhong, Siheng Chen, and Chen Feng
    IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters 2022

View all publications →