About

I am an AI Research Scientist at MiroMind, working on coding agents and LLM reasoning. I study how to make LLMs reason more reliably on mathematical and programming tasks, combining search and agent training with feedback from testing, symbolic reasoning, and formal verification.

Previously, I was a postdoctoral researcher at ETH Zürich, working with Prof. Zhendong Su. I obtained my Ph.D. from Nanjing University under the supervision of Prof. Xiaoxing Ma and Prof. Jian Lü, and my B.Sc. in Mathematics from Southwest Jiaotong University.

Research

My research focuses on coding agents and LLM reasoning. I use verification as a source of feedback to guide search, train agents, and evaluate the correctness of model-generated solutions.

Research perspective

I study how AI agents can solve challenging programming and mathematical problems, with a focus on learning from reliable feedback. My work brings together model training and test-time search: training develops reusable reasoning strategies, while search lets agents explore, check, and refine solutions to harder tasks.

Testing, symbolic solvers, and proof assistants provide complementary feedback in this process. I use them to build training signals, guide search, and evaluate solutions against explicit requirements. I am particularly interested in bringing these ideas to real-world software, where generating plausible code is only the beginning: the code must also satisfy its specification.

Selected projects

Code-Verification Agents. We combine SFT/RL training with hierarchical proof search to build code-verification agents, from Goedel-Code-Prover to an internal 200B-parameter model. Paper ↗ · Code ↗

Verified Kernel Optimization. We build an agent-driven framework for optimizing real-world LLM pre-training kernels, combining a testing harness with Lean 4 proof generation to verify correctness. Website ↗ · Code ↗

Verified Code Generation for Real-World Systems. We introduce Vero, a benchmark of 103 Lean 4 tasks derived from eBPF, LLVM, and seL4, to evaluate agents’ ability to generate code and prove it meets new specifications. Paper ↗ · Code ↗

Search-Based Formal Reasoning. We combine LLM-guided tree search with symbolic reasoning and proof-assistant feedback to tackle Olympiad inequalities and operating-system verification. NeqLIPS Paper ↗ · Code ↗ · seL4 Paper ↗ · Code ↗

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Publications

Full bibliography ↗

* Equal contribution; † Project leader.

Search & filter

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Experience & Education

MAY 2026 — PRESENT

MiroMind

AI Research Scientist

Coding agents, LLM reasoning, and verification · Singapore & Redwood City, CA

SEP 2025 — APR 2026

ETH Zürich

Postdoctoral Researcher

Supervisor: Prof. Zhendong Su · Zürich, Switzerland

JUL 2023 — DEC 2024

Microsoft Research Asia

Research Intern, Systems Research Group

Mentor: Dr. Fan Yang · Beijing, China

SEP 2020 — JUN 2025

Nanjing University

Ph.D. in Computer Science

Advisors: Prof. Xiaoxing Ma and Prof. Jian Lü

SEP 2017 — JUN 2020

Nanjing University

M.Sc. in Software Engineering

Advisor: Prof. Xiaoxing Ma

SEP 2013 — JUN 2017

Southwest Jiaotong University

B.Sc. in Mathematics and Applied Mathematics

Advisor: Prof. Chengjing Wang

Honors & Awards

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Academic Service

Program committee & reviewing

NeurIPS 2023–2025 · ICML 2024–2025
ICLR 2023–2025

Teaching assistant

Software Engineering Seminar · ETH Zürich
Fall 2025

Discrete Mathematics · Nanjing University
2020, 2021, 2022

Useful Links

My study notes (中文)Lean communityThe Verus guideTheoretical Machine Learning (中文)

Contact

Email: lizenan2018@gmail.com

MiroMind · Singapore & Redwood City, CA