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Wonyeol Lee

Pohang University of Science and Technology · Computer Science

About the Lab

Professor Wonyeol Lee's research lab specializes in formal verification and static analysis of low-level system software, with a strong focus on floating-point computations, numerical accuracy, and correctness in critical mathematical libraries. The lab develops advanced static analysis techniques that reduce verification tasks to mathematical optimization problems, enabling automated and rigorous proof of floating-point implementations. It also explores the intersection of program verification with probabilistic and differentiable programming, aiming to ensure correctness in modern machine learning systems. The lab's work bridges theoretical foundations with practical systems, targeting real-world software such as Intel’s math libraries.

formal verificationfloating-point correctnessstatic analysisnumerical accuracyprogram verification

Research Overview

Papers
32
Total Citations
237
Papers (5y)
13
Primary Field
Computer Science

Research Output Trend

Figures are computed from collected data and may differ slightly.

Publications per year (5y)
13total
2022
2023
2024
2025
2026
Citations per year (5y)
20total
20222023202420252026

Selected Papers

15
1
Article|59 citations·2014
CT-IC: Continuously activated and Time-restricted Independent Cascade model for viral marketing
Jinha Kim, Wonyeol Lee, Hwanjo Yu
SJR Q1Knowledge-Based Systems
Statistical and Nonlinear PhysicsPhysics and Astronomy
2
Article|29 citations·2012
CT-IC: Continuously Activated and Time-Restricted Independent Cascade Model for Viral Marketing
Wonyeol Lee, Jinha Kim, Hwanjo Yu

Influence maximization problem with applications to viral marketing has gained much attention. Underlying influence diffusion models affect influence maximizing nodes because they focus on difference aspect of influence diffusion. Nevertheless, existing diffusion models overlook two important aspects of real-world marketing - continuous trials and time restriction. This paper proposes a new realistic influence diffusion model called Continously activated and Time-restricted IC (CT-IC) model whic

Statistical and Nonlinear PhysicsPhysics and Astronomy
3
Article|27 citations·2017
On automatically proving the correctness of math.h implementations
Wonyeol Lee, Rahul Sharma, Alex Aiken
SJR Q1Proceedings of the ACM on Programming LanguagesOA

Industry standard implementations of math.h claim (often without formal proof) tight bounds on floating-point errors. We demonstrate a novel static analysis that proves these bounds and verifies the correctness of these implementations. Our key insight is a reduction of this verification task to a set of mathematical optimization problems that can be solved by off-the-shelf computer algebra systems. We use this analysis to prove the correctness of implementations in Intel's math library automati

Computational Theory and MathematicsComputer Science
4
Article|27 citations·2016
Verifying bit-manipulations of floating-point
Wonyeol Lee, Rahul Sharma, Alex Aiken
OA

Reasoning about floating-point is difficult and becomes only more so if there is an interplay between floating-point and bit-level operations. Even though real-world floating-point libraries use implementations that have such mixed computations, no systematic technique to verify the correctness of the implementations of such computations is known. In this paper, we present the first general technique for verifying the correctness of mixed binaries, which combines abstraction, analytical optimiza

Computational Theory and MathematicsComputer Science
5
Article|20 citations·2019
Towards verified stochastic variational inference for probabilistic programs
Wonyeol Lee, Hangyeol Yu, Xavier Rival, Hongseok Yang
SJR Q1Proceedings of the ACM on Programming LanguagesOA

Probabilistic programming is the idea of writing models from statistics and machine learning using program notations and reasoning about these models using generic inference engines. Recently its combination with deep learning has been explored intensely, which led to the development of so called deep probabilistic programming languages, such as Pyro, Edward and ProbTorch. At the core of this development lie inference engines based on stochastic variational inference algorithms. When asked to fi

Artificial IntelligenceComputer Science
6
Article|20 citations·2014
A proof system for separation logic with magic wand
Wonyeol Lee, Sungwoo Park

Separation logic is an extension of Hoare logic which is acknowledged as an enabling technology for large-scale program verification. It features two new logical connectives, separating conjunction and separating implication, but most of the applications of separation logic have exploited only separating conjunction without considering separating implication. Nevertheless the power of separating implication has been well recognized and there is a growing interest in its use for program verificat

Artificial IntelligenceComputer Science
7
Preprint|10 citations·2020
On Correctness of Automatic Differentiation for Non-Differentiable Functions
Wonyeol Lee, Hangyeol Yu, Xavier Rival, Hongseok Yang
arXiv (Cornell University)OA

Differentiation lies at the core of many machine-learning algorithms, and is\nwell-supported by popular autodiff systems, such as TensorFlow and PyTorch.\nOriginally, these systems have been developed to compute derivatives of\ndifferentiable functions, but in practice, they are commonly applied to\nfunctions with non-differentiabilities. For instance, neural networks using\nReLU define non-differentiable functions in general, but the gradients of\nlosses involving those functions are computed u

Artificial IntelligenceComputer Science
8
Article|8 citations·2023
Smoothness Analysis for Probabilistic Programs with Application to Optimised Variational Inference
Wonyeol Lee, Xavier Rival, Hongseok Yang
SJR Q1Proceedings of the ACM on Programming LanguagesOA

We present a static analysis for discovering differentiable or more generally smooth parts of a given probabilistic program, and show how the analysis can be used to improve the pathwise gradient estimator, one of the most popular methods for posterior inference and model learning. Our improvement increases the scope of the estimator from differentiable models to non-differentiable ones without requiring manual intervention of the user; the improved estimator automatically identifies differentia

Artificial IntelligenceComputer Science
9
Preprint|7 citations·2018
Reparameterization Gradient for Non-differentiable Models
Wonyeol Lee, Hangyeol Yu, Hongseok Yang
arXiv (Cornell University)OA

We present a new algorithm for stochastic variational inference that targets at models with non-differentiable densities. One of the key challenges in stochastic variational inference is to come up with a low-variance estimator of the gradient of a variational objective. We tackle the challenge by generalizing the reparameterization trick, one of the most effective techniques for addressing the variance issue for differentiable models, so that the trick works for non-differentiable models as wel

Artificial IntelligenceComputer Science
10
Article|6 citations·2024
Expressive power of ReLU and step networks under floating-point operations
Yeachan Park, Geonho Hwang, Wonyeol Lee, Sejun Park, Sejun Park
SJR Q1Neural Networks
Computational Theory and MathematicsComputer Science
11
Article|4 citations·2018
Reparameterization Gradient for Non-differentiable Models
Wonyeol Lee, Hangyeol Yu, Hongseok Yang
arXiv (Cornell University)OA

We present a new algorithm for stochastic variational inference that targets at models with non-differentiable densities. One of the key challenges in stochastic variational inference is to come up with a low-variance estimator of the gradient of a variational objective. We tackle the challenge by generalizing the reparameterization trick, one of the most effective techniques for addressing the variance issue for differentiable models, so that the trick works for non-differentiable models as wel

Artificial IntelligenceComputer Science
12
Article|4 citations·2014
A proof system for separation logic with magic wand
Wonyeol Lee, Sungwoo Park
ACM SIGPLAN NoticesOA

Separation logic is an extension of Hoare logic which is acknowledged as an enabling technology for large-scale program verification. It features two new logical connectives, separating conjunction and separating implication, but most of the applications of separation logic have exploited only separating conjunction without considering separating implication. Nevertheless the power of separating implication has been well recognized and there is a growing interest in its use for program verificat

Artificial IntelligenceComputer Science
13
Article|4 citations·2018
On Automatically Proving the Correctness of math.h Implementations
Wonyeol Lee, Rahul Sharma, Alex Aiken
Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages

Industry standard implementations of {\tt math.h} claim (often without formal proof) tight bounds on floating-point errors. We demonstrate a novel static analysis that proves these bounds and verifies the correctness of these implementations. Our key insight is a reduction of this verification task to a set of mathematical optimization problems that can be solved by off-the-shelf computer algebra systems. We use this analysis to prove the correctness of implementations in Intel’s math library au

Computational Theory and MathematicsComputer Science
14
Article|2 citations·2009
Edge detection using morphological amoebas in noisy images
Wonyeol Lee, Se Yun Kim, Young Woo Kim, Jae Young Lim, Dong-Min Lim

Edge detection is a significant step in image processing. Morphological edge detectors developed until now used a fixed structuring element (SE) on all the image pixels; however, they cannot consider the local features of an image due to the fixed SE and we should choose an appropriate SE by lots of experiments. In this paper, new morphological edge detectors using amoebas, dynamic structuring elements which adapt their shapes to image contours, are proposed. The experimental results show that a

BiophysicsBiochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology
15
Preprint|2 citations·2022
Smoothness Analysis for Probabilistic Programs with Application to Optimised Variational Inference
Wonyeol Lee, Xavier Rival, Hongseok Yang
arXiv (Cornell University)OA

We present a static analysis for discovering differentiable or more generally smooth parts of a given probabilistic program, and show how the analysis can be used to improve the pathwise gradient estimator, one of the most popular methods for posterior inference and model learning. Our improvement increases the scope of the estimator from differentiable models to non-differentiable ones without requiring manual intervention of the user; the improved estimator automatically identifies differentia

Artificial IntelligenceComputer Science

Research Areas

Artificial IntelligenceComputational Theory and MathematicsStatistical and Nonlinear PhysicsElectrical and Electronic EngineeringBiophysicsComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition

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