Welcome to the homepage of CSE 645: Seminar in Languages, Fall 2026!
General Information
Course description: We will read papers and discuss research ranging from high-level specifications (such as logic, rules, and sets) to algorithms and methods for efficient implementations of programming languages, with a wide range of applications.
Everyone is welcome. If you are enrolled in the class, you are expected to attend a majority of the meetings and present a paper.
Instructors: Annie Liu, CR Ramakrishnan, Michael Kifer, David Warren, Paul Fodor.
Hours: Thursdays, 11AM-12:20PM ET on Zoom
https://stonybrook.zoom.us/j/94298584108?pwd=OXRLemROdk8xOHY3NXFRV2xjQmhVUT09
Mailing list: https://groups.google.com/a/cs.stonybrook.edu/g/languages
Schedule
The following schedule is tentative and subject to change.
08/27 Organization and topics discussion
9/3 Anthony will discuss: Java, Calc-1-Solver and Tau-Prolog-Extension in JavaScript.
9/10 No seminar because of travel
9/17 Jihu's RPE: LLM-Assisted Authoring of Knowledge Bases for Regulatory Language.
9/24 Jiaxuan will present: Formal Language Characterizations of Cellular Automaton Limit Sets. Lyman Hurd. Complex Systems 1 (1987), 69-80. Paper. Slides.
10/1 Cody will present: BIO Logical Agents: Norms, Beliefs, Intentions in Defeasible Logic. Guido Governatori and Antonino Rotolo. Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems, 2008. Volume 17, 36–69. Paper. Slides.
10/8 Vikram will present: One use of the ToolEmu — Batole, Fraol, Foutse Khomh, and Hridesh Rajan. "RefineAct: Automatic Runtime Verification of LLM Agent Actions." (2026). Paper. Slides.
10/15 Yuyu will present: Logic-Guided Data Extraction with Answer Set Programming and Large Language Models. Mario Alviano, Lorenzo Grillo, Nicola Leone, Fabrizio Lo Scudo. ICLP 2026. Paper. Slides.
10/22 Ethan will present his own work on: Formal Specification and Runtime Checking of HotStuff: A Responsive Linear Byzantine Consensus Protocol.
10/29 Hritwik will present: Identifying the risks of LM agents with an LM-emulated sandbox. Yangjun Ruan, Honghua Dong, Andrew Wang, Silviu Pitis, Yongchao Zhou, Jimmy Ba, Yann Dubois, Chris Maddison, and Tatsunori Hashimoto. In International Conference on Learning Representations, vol. 2024, pp. 27031-27098. 2024. Paper. Slides.
11/5 Weiheng will present: Worst-case optimal join algorithms: Techniques, results, and open problems. Hung Ngo. In Proceedings of the 37th ACM SIGMOD-SIGACT-SIGAI Symposium on Principles of Database Systems, pp. 111-124. 2018. Paper. Slides.
11/12 Dennis will present: Question Answering with LLMs and Learning from Answer Sets. Manuel Alejandro Borroto Santana, Katie Gallagher, Antonio Ielo, Irfan Kareem, Francesco Ricca, Alessandra Russo. ICLP 2026. Paper. Slides.
11/19 Ahmad will present: SMAC3: A versatile Bayesian optimization package for hyperparameter optimization. Marius Lindauer, Katharina Eggensperger, Matthias Feurer, André Biedenkapp, Difan Deng, Carolin Benjamins, Tim Ruhkopf, René Sass, and Frank Hutter. Journal of Machine Learning Research 23, no. 54 (2022): 1-9. Paper. Slides.
11/26 Thanksgiving break
12/3 Joy will present: Case study: solving P-99 with LPTP and an LLM. and Case study: proving sqrt(2) irrational with LPTP and an LLM. Fred Mesnard, Thierry Marianne, Étienne Payet and Wim Vanhoof. ICLP Technical Communication 2026. Paper 1. Paper 2. Slides.
Daniel will present: XAI-LAW: A Logic Programming Tool for Modeling, Explaining, and Learning Legal Decisions. Dovier, Agostino, Talissa Dreossi, Andrea Formisano, and Benedetta Strizzolo. In ICLP 2025. Paper. Slides.