Hi, this is John Lü 吕正旸. Welcome to my personal webpage!

I am a 2nd-year PhD student at UWaterloo, under the supervision of Vijay Ganesh and Arie Gurfinkel.

My research interest is to desgin learning-based algorithms that circumvent the worst-case complexity of NP-hard problems by focusing on application-specific instances.

News

• [Feb 2025] I co-organized and presented the AAAI’25 tutorial ML for Solvers! In the tutorial, we introduced the latest advancements of how various machine learning techniques are used in logic solvers. Slides and materials are available on our website. Thanks to everyone who attended and contributed to the discussion!
• [Nov 2024] From May to November, I successfully completed a Google Summer of Code project! Many thanks to my GSoC mentors Po-Chun Chien and Dr. Nian-Ze Lee from LMU Munich. During this project, we developed the first ML-based algorithm selector for the Btor2 hardware verificaiton prroblem. I will be presenting some early results at the AAAI’25 Student Program.
• [Sep 2024] I start serving as the ECE-GSA Co-Chair for the upcoming year. I’m excited to contribute to the community and help foster a supportive and inclusive environment for fellow graduate students. Let me know if you have any ideas or suggestions for initiatives or events you’d like to see this year!
• [Aug 2024] Our paper Layered and Staged Monte Carlo Tree Search for SMT Strategy Synthesis is presented at IJCAI 2024! Unfortunately, I couldn’t travel to Jeju Island due to a broken ankle, but I’m super grateful to Prof. Kate Larson for help us present this research!
• [Jul 2024] At SMT 2024, I made my first paper presentation (with crutches)!
• [Jul 2024] Our solver Z3-alpha won multiple awards at SMT-COMP 2024! It excelled across divisions such as QF_Datatypes, QF_LinearIntArith, QF_NonLinearIntArith, and QF_NonLinearRealArith! Read more on Georgia Tech News.
• [Jun 2024] Happy to receive the Winter 2024 FOE Graduate Scholarship! Some more bucks to enjoy a decent dinner : )
• [May 2024] Attended the inaugural AI-SCORE Summer School and had so much fun!
• [Sep 2023] Start working as the Website Chair for CAV 2024.
• [Jul 2023] Offcially start my PhD journey at UWaterloo! Thanks for the generous funding from the Engineering Excellence Doctoral Fellowship (EEDF) and the Deans Entrance Award.