Naifeng Zhang
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
upcoming
| Jun 17, 2026 Boulder | Short paper at PLDI 2026 Presenting our work on Semantics Lifting for Scientific Kernels at ACM SRC. |
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| Apr 24, 2026 paper | Our extended abstract on Semantics Lifting for Scientific Kernels was accepted at PLDI 2026 for the ACM Student Research Competition. |
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| Apr 20, 2026 talk | I attended Penn FoQuS 2026 at the University of Pennsylvania and presented Towards Semantics Lifting for Quantum Circuits. |
| Mar 23, 2026 talk | I co-organzied a tutorial on SPIRAL: A Code Generation Approach to Hardware-Software Co-Design at ASPLOS 2026. |
| Feb 26, 2026 talk | I gave a GSPS talk at Carnegie Mellon University on Code Generation for Cryptographic Kernels using Multi-word Modular Arithmetic. |
| Jan 27, 2026 talk | I visited the University of California, Los Angeles (talk at the VAST Lab, hosted by Professor Jason Cong), the University of Southern California (hosted by Professor Viktor K. Prasanna), and the California Institute of Technology (hosted by Professor Adam Wierman). |
| Dec 22, 2025 paper | Our paper on LibraryX: A Framework for Cross-Library-Call Optimization was accepted at IPDPS 2026. |
| Nov 22, 2025 talk | Our tutorial proposal on SPIRAL: A Code Generation Approach to Hardware-Software Co-Design 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. |
selected publications
Please refer to my cv for the most up-to-date list of publications.