Curriculum vitae

Download CV (PDF)

Education

University of Virginia

Aug 2025 – present

PhD student in Computer Science · Charlottesville, VA

Advisor: Sebastian Elbaum

University of Washington

Sep 2021 – Jun 2025

B.S. in Computer Science · Seattle, WA

GPA: 3.7 / 4.0

Research experience

University of Virginia

Aug 2025 – present

Graduate Research Assistant

Reasoning–trajectory consistency

Jan 2026 – present

Investigating whether Alpamayo 1.5’s driving reasoning can serve as a behavioral specification. Created a benchmark of 150 manually annotated reasoning–trajectory pairs and developed lane-relative runtime monitors, achieving F1 = 0.75 for inconsistency detection (+0.13 over the strongest baseline).

Reasoning coverage for autonomous driving

Aug 2026 – present

Developing a coverage framework that represents VLA reasoning as paths connecting observations, causal relations, and driving decisions. Evaluating whether reasoning-based test prioritization reveals failures beyond scenario- and trajectory-based coverage.

Attribution stability and safety

Aug 2025 – present

Investigated whether unstable visual attributions reveal risks missed by stable steering predictions. Developed adversarial perturbations and evaluated them in closed-loop CARLA simulations, finding limited predictive value for near-term failures.

University of Washington

Jan 2023 – Jun 2025

Undergraduate Research Assistant · Advisor: Michael D. Ernst

Unit test generation via program analysis

Jan 2023 – Jun 2025

Extended Randoop with type-dependency and side-effect analyses to construct missing inputs and generate diverse object states. Built an evaluation pipeline across 30+ Java projects using code coverage and mutation testing.

Cross-language API exploration

Jan – Mar 2025

Built Jungle-Mapper to discover API construction sequences. Designed a shared graph representation and query engine for Java and Rust.

Publications & preprints

Drive the Thoughts: Runtime Monitoring of VLA Reasoning-Trajectory Consistency

Tian Yu, Lu Feng, and Sebastian Elbaum. 2026.

Manuscript under review · Code

Industry

China Pacific Insurance Company

Jul – Sep 2023

Software Engineering Intern · Shanghai, China

LLM application development.

Honors & awards

Provost’s FellowshipUniversity of Virginia
Dean’s ListUniversity of Washington · Multiple quarters

Technical skills

Languages: Python, Java, Bash
Development: Git, Linux, Docker
Simulation: AlpaSim, CARLA