Gagandeep Singh

Gagandeep Singh

Assistant Professor, Siebel School of Computing and Data Science, UIUC

Gagandeep Singh

I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), where I lead the FOrmally Certified Automation and Learning (FOCAL) Lab. Our group has a unique combination of expertise in machine learning, formal methods, mechanistic interpretability, and AI safety. We have been at the forefront of advancing Trustworthy AI, pioneering state-of-the-art methods for formal verification, synthesis, monitoring, and interpreting frontier AI systems. We have also made automated reasoning methods based on abstract interpretation for deterministic and probabilistic computations more scalable, precise, and easier to develop and use. Our group has received awards and fellowships from NSF, Amazon, Google, Qualcomm, Bloomberg, Anthropic, AMD, CapitalOne, and Open Philanthropy. Some of the topics (in no particular order) that we currently work on are

  • Formal Verification of LLMs, VLMs, and Agents
  • Constrained LLM Generation with Rich, Semantic Constraints
  • Mechanistic Interpretability
  • Alignment Methods for LLMs
  • Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback
  • Theoretical Understanding of LLMs
  • Securing Agentic AI
  • Compilers for Abstract Interpretation
  • Numerical Abstract Interpretation
  • Solvers for Non-linear and Probabilistic Computations
  • Economic and Social Impact of LLMs and AI Governance

I obtained a PhD in Computer Science from ETH Zurich in 2020 working with Prof. Markus Püschel and Prof. Martin Vechev. During my PhD, I designed scalable and precise automated reasoning methods and tools for programs and deep neural networks. I co-received the ACM SIGPLAN Doctoral Dissertation Award given annually to the best dissertations in the area of Programming Languages. Before that, I completed a Masters in Computer Science at ETH in 2014 receiving the ETH Master Medal and Bachelors in Computer Science and Engineering from IIT Patna in 2012 receiving the President of India Gold Medal.

For prospective PhD candidates: Please apply to the UIUC CS graduate program and mention my name. We are looking to hire at least one to start in Fall’26. Students interested in the intersection of AI, Social Sciences (e.g., Economics), and Policy Making will be preferred. I will get back to you if there is a good match.

For UIUC students looking for a paid RA: We currently do not have any openings.

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