Mike He
Ph.D. student
Princeton University

Mike He

Formal Methods for and with LLM Agents

I am a Ph.D. student at the Princeton Programming Languages Group advised by Prof. Aarti Gupta. I am broadly interested in programming languages, formal methods and compilers. My current research focuses on practical formal and semi-formal methods for distributed systems and agentic systems, and I am working with the P ecosystem for verifying and reasoning about distributed systems.

Before joining Princeton, I studied at the University of Washington, where I was privileged to work with Prof. Zachary Tatlock on equality saturation and its applications to machine learning compilers.

In my free time, I enjoy playing the violin (I've been playing it longer than coding). You can find my archived recordings here.

Awards & honors

Selected Publications

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Formal Methods for Systems/LLMs

Specy: Learning Specifications for Distributed Systems from Event Traces

Mike He, Ankush Desai, Aishwarya Jagarapu, Doug Terry, Sharad Malik, Aarti Gupta

Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications (OOPSLA) · 2026

Soteria: Formally Verified Planning with Runtime Enforcement for Safe LLM Agents

Mike He, Ankush Desai, Sharad Malik, Aarti Gupta

Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), To Appear · 2026 Oral

Verification of Compiler-to-Accelerator Mappings for Machine Learning Accelerators

Akash Gaonkar, Mike He, Yi Li, Bo-Yuan Huang, Andrew Cheung, Vishal Canumalla, Gus Smith, Zachary Tatlock, Grigory Fedyukovich, Sharad Malik, Aarti Gupta

ArXiV · 2026

Formal Methods with LLMs

Göedel-Code-Prover: Hierarchical Proof Search for Open State-of-the-Art Code Verification

Zenan Li*, Ziran Yang*, Deyuan He, Haoyu Zhao, Andrew Zhao, Shange Tang, Kaiyu Yang, Aarti Gupta, Zhendong Su, Chi Jin

Conference on Language Modeling (COLM) · 2026

AlgoVeri: An Aligned Benchmark for Verified Code Generation on Classical Algorithms

Haoyu Zhao*, Ziran Yang*, Jiawei Li*, Deyuan He*, Zenan Li*, Chi Jin, Venugopal V. Veeravalli, Aarti Gupta, Sanjeev Arora

International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) · 2026 Spotlight

Theory-Level Autoformalization: From Isolated Statements to Unified Formal Knowledge Bases

Marcus Min, Mike He, Zhaoyu Li, Zixuan Yi, Sharad Malik, Aarti Gupta, Xujie Si, Osbert Bastani

International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), Position Track · 2026 Spotlight

* denotes a core contributor.

Recent Talks

All talks →
July 2026

AlgoVeri: An Aligned Benchmark for Verified Code Generation on Classical Algorithms

ICML'26

April 13, 2026

Specy: Learning Specifications for Distributed Systems from Event Traces

Georgia Tech - Dependently Typed Talk

Oct 15, 2025

Ranking Formal Specifications using LLMs

SPLASH/LMPL'25

Background

Full CV ↗
Education
Experience
Professional activities
  • Reviewer: NeurIPS, IEEE TMC, AAE@KDD, SciPy
  • Artifact Evaluation: POPL, PLDI, MLSys, MICRO

Beyond research

Violin recordings
A little more about me
  • I love classical music and enjoy playing the violin. I've been playing the violin for about 20 years. I received the Lv.9 certification issued by the Central Conservatory of Music when I was in middle school. You can find some of my recordings here. Some video recordings are available @ Bilibili (the website is in Chinese).
  • I was a part-time translator / proofreading editor in Gawr Gura's Chinese fansub team. Gura, now graduated, was a virtual streamer at YouTube affiliated with Hololive Production.
  • My Erdős number is 3: Mike He [3] → Sanjeev Arora [2] → László Babai [1] → Paul Erdős [0]
Friends & colleagues

In alphabetical order of last name.

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The logo of this website was designed by my friend, Melina.