Naifeng Zhang

self_2024.jpg

Miami, Fall 2024

I am a fifth-year Ph.D. candidate in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, advised by Professor Franz Franchetti.

I received a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science with honors and a bachelor’s degree in Mathematics with honors from the University of Southern California, advised by Professor Viktor K. Prasanna. My undergraduate research is featured here.

My research interests lie in the areas of code generation, compilers, and programming languages. Currently, I am developing SPIRAL for

⬇️ High-performance code generation targeting CPUs, GPUs, and ASICs;

⬆️ Semantics lifting for performance portability and safeguarding AI-generated code.

news

Nov 22, 2025
talk
Our tutorial proposal on SPIRAL: Pre-Silicon and Early-Prototype Performance Estimation Using Highly Optimized Code was accepted at ASPLOS 2026.
Nov 08, 2025
paper
Our paper on Faster Game Solving via Hyperparameter Schedules was accepted at AAAI 2026. This work started as my Computational Game Solving course project and has since been taught in the course in the following years.
Oct 18, 2025
talk
I gave an invited talk at ZKARCH 2025 on Code Generation for Cryptographic Kernels using Multi-word Modular Arithmetic.
Oct 02, 2025
talk
I gave a CALCM talk at Carnegie Mellon University on Towards Closing the Performance Gap for Cryptographic Kernels Between CPUs and Specialized Hardware.
Sep 17, 2025
talk
I co-led the SPIRAL 8.5.1 tutorial at HPEC 2025.
Sep 08, 2025
paper
Our paper on A RISC-V Vector Extension for Multi-word Arithmetic was accepted at RISCV-HPC 2025, held in conjunction with SC 2025.
Aug 20, 2025
paper
Our paper on Towards Automated Reasoning Chains for Verification of LLM-Generated Scientific Code was accepted at HPEC 2025.
Aug 05, 2025
service
I served on the Program Committee for AAAI 2026.
Jul 16, 2025
paper
Our paper on Towards Closing the Performance Gap for Cryptographic Kernels Between CPUs and Specialized Hardware was accepted at MICRO 2025.
May 27, 2025
service
I served on the Program Committee for the AI4Dev workshop, held in conjunction with ICPP 2025.

selected publications

Please refer to my cv for the most up-to-date list of publications.

2025

  1. MICRO
    Towards Closing the Performance Gap for Cryptographic Kernels Between CPUs and Specialized Hardware
    Naifeng Zhang, Sophia Fu, and Franz Franchetti
    The IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture, 2025
    Invited talk at CMU
    PDF Code Slides
  2. CGO
    Code Generation for Cryptographic Kernels using Multi-word Modular Arithmetic on GPU
    Naifeng Zhang, and Franz Franchetti
    The International Symposium on Code Generation and Optimization, 2025
    Invited talks at CMU, Penn, NYU, USC, and MICRO-W ’25
    PDF Code Slides
  3. POPL-W
    Towards Semantics Lifting for Scientific Computing: A Case Study on FFT
    Naifeng Zhang, Sanil Rao, Mike Franusich, and 1 more author
    The Theory and Practice of Static Analysis Workshop, in conjunction with the ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages, 2025
    Invited talk at ORNL
    PDF Slides

2024

  1. PACT-SRC
    Accelerating High-Precision Number Theoretic Transforms using Intel AVX-512
    Sophia Fu, Naifeng Zhang, and Franz Franchetti
    The International Conference on Parallel Architectures and Compilation Techniques, 2024
    Extended abstract with poster and presentation
    First Place, ACM Student Research Competition
    Best Poster Runner-up at PRISM Annual Review, Systems & Software track
    PDF

2023

  1. CGO-SRC
    Generating Number Theoretic Transforms for Multi-Word Integer Data Types
    Naifeng Zhang, and Franz Franchetti
    The International Symposium on Code Generation and Optimization, 2023
    Extended abstract with poster and presentation
    Second Place, ACM Student Research Competition
    PDF Poster