Welcome to the homepage of CSE 645: Seminar in Languages, Spring 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, 12:30-1:50PM 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.
1/29 Organization and topics discussion
2/5: David Warren (with help from Annie) with slides by Michael Kifer. Elements of Knowledge Representation with Rules (part 1)
Basics: rules, recursion, and negation (closed-world assumption, stratified, non-stratified)
2/12: David will continue the above presentation.
2/19: David Yeung will discuss: "All you need is dag." Keidar, Idit, Eleftherios Kokoris-Kogias, Oded Naor, and Alexander Spiegelman. In Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing, pp. 165-175. 2021. Slides.
2/26: Daniel will discuss: Minimize AI hallucinations and deliver up to 99% verification accuracy with Automated Reasoning checks. Danilo Poccia. Amazon Bedrock, Amazon Bedrock Guardrails. Artificial Intelligence, Generative AI, Launch, News, Responsible AI 2025. Slides.
3/5: Ethan will discuss: Modeling Next-Token Prediction as Left-Nested Intuitionistic Implication by Paul Tarau. arXiv preprint arXiv:2601.19915 (2026).
3/12: Andrew will discuss: VERUS-LM: a Versatile Framework for Combining LLMs with Symbolic Reasoning. Benjamin Callewaert, Simon Vandevelde and Joost Vennekens. ICLP 2025.
3/19: Spring break
3/26: Harsh Singh will discuss: BLAZER: Bootstrapping LLM-based Manipulation Agents with Zero-Shot Data Generation. Rocktim Jyoti Das, Harsh Singh, Diana Turmakhan, Muhammad Abdullah Sohail, Mingfei Han, Preslav Nakov, Fabio Pizzati, Ivan Laptev. arXiv preprint arXiv:2510.08572 (2025).
4/2: Harsh Shah will discuss: LLM-Based Generation of Formal Specifications from Natural-Language Contracts: Early Experiments with SYMBOLEO. Mounira Nihad Zitouni, Amal Ahmed Anda , Sahil Rajpal, Daniel Amyot , John Mylopoulos. International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE) 2025.
4/9: Shivam will discuss: LP-SLAM: language-perceptive RGB-D SLAM framework exploiting large language model. Weiyi Zhang, Yushi Guo, Liting Niu, Peijun Li, Chun Zhang, Zeyu Wan, Jiaxiang Yan, Fasih Ud Din Farrukh, Debing Zhang. Complex & Intelligent Systems. Volume 10, pages 5391–5409, 2024.
4/16: SooAnn will discuss: Using Learning from Answer Sets for robust question answering with LLM. Irfan Kareem, Katie Gallagher, Manuel Borroto, Francesco Ricca and Alessandra Russo. LPNMR24.
4/23: Dirac will discuss: Scallop: A Language for Neurosymbolic Programming . Ziyang Li, Jiani Huang, and Mayur Naik . PLDI 2023.
4/30: Jiyang will discuss: XAI-LAW: A Logic Programming Tool for Modeling, Explaining, and Learning Legal Decisions . Dovier, Agostino, Talissa Dreossi, Andrea Formisano, and Benedetta Strizzolo. ICLP 2025.
5/7: Stanley will discuss: Formally Verified Next-generation Airborne Collision Avoidance Games in ACAS X. Rachel Cleaveland, Stefan Mitsch, and André Platzer. R Cleaveland, S Mitsch, A Platzer. ACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems, 2022.