Trusted AI and Reasoning Beyond LLM

Speaker: Prof. Jin-Song Dong
National University of Singapore

Title: Trusted AI and Reasoning Beyond LLM

Date: Thursday, 28 August 2025

Time: 11:00am - 12:00 noon

Venue: Room 4502 (via lift 25/26), HKUST

Abstract:

The rise of code-centric Large Language Models (LLMs) has reshaped the software engineering world with tools like Copilot, DeepSeek, and OpenAI 03 that can easily generate code. However, there is no correctness guarantee for the code generated by LLMs, which suffer from the hallucination problem. The first part of this talk shows that the program refinement calculus can be used as a formal chain of thought to guide LLM and verify the correctness of the LLM-generated code. The second part of this talk investigates LLM-aided System Design, where LLM-enhanced formal methods agents are proposed. The third part of this talk shows the weakness of LLM in solving planning and strategy analysis problems where formal reasoning techniques are needed.

Biography:

Jin-Song Dong is a full professor at the National University of Singapore. His research spans a range of fields, including formal methods, safety and security systems, trusted AI, sports analytics, and verified LLM code synthesis. He co-founded the commercialized PAT verification system, which has garnered thousands of registered users from over 150 countries. Jin Song also co-founded the commercialized trusted machine learning system Silas (www.depintel.com), with 50K+ downloads. He served on the editorial board of ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology, Formal Aspects of Computing, and Innovations in Systems and Software Engineering, A NASA Journal. He has successfully supervised 34 PhD students, many of whom became tenured faculty members at leading universities worldwide. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Engineers Australia. Jin Song developed Markov Decision Process (MDP) models for tennis strategy analysis using PAT, assisting professional players with pre-match analysis (beating the world's best). In his spare time, he coaches tennis to his students and his three children, all of whom reached the #1 national junior ranking in Singapore/Australia. Two of his children have earned the US NCAA Division-1 full scholarships.