Peiyao Sheng

I am a Researcher at Sentient. My research focuses on the foundational scientific and engineering topics that are crucial to blockchains and AI being ubiquitous in society. I am particularly interested in the security and governance of decentralized systems, and their interaction with AI agents.

I received my Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, advised by Prof. Pramod Viswanath. Previously, I was a visiting researcher at Princeton University. During my Ph.D., I co-founded Witness Chain, a startup that aimed to unify the DePIN economy, exemplifying the practical application of my research. I have also interned at Chainlink Labs, advised by Dr. Dahlia Malkhi. I received the Bachelor’s degree from Shanghai Jiao Tong University in ACM Honors Class, Zhiyuan College and was an undergraduate research intern at UIUC advised by Prof. Bo Li.

Preprints

• LiveCodeBench Pro: How Do Olympiad Medalists Judge LLMs in Competitive Programming?
  Zihan Zheng, Zerui Cheng, Zeyu Shen, Shang Zhou, Kaiyuan Liu, Hansen He, Dongruixuan Li, Stanley Wei, Hangyi Hao, Jianzhu Yao, Peiyao Sheng, Zixuan Wang, Wenhao Chai, Aleksandra Korolova, Peter Henderson, Sanjeev Arora, Pramod Viswanath, Jingbo Shang, Saining Xie
• CHANCERY: Evaluating corporate governance reasoning capabilities in language models
  Lucas Irwin, Arda Kaz, Peiyao Sheng, Pramod Viswanath
• Real AI Agents with Fake Memories: Fatal Context Manipulation Attacks on Web3 Agents
  Atharv Singh Patlan, Peiyao Sheng, S. Ashwin Hebbar, Prateek Mittal, Pramod Viswanath
• Scalable Fingerprinting of Large Language Models
  Anshul Nasery, Jonathan Hayase, Creston Brooks, Peiyao Sheng, Himanshu Tyagi, Pramod Viswanath, Sewoong Oh
• On Orchestrating Parallel Broadcasts for Distributed Ledgers
  Peiyao Sheng, Chenyuan Wu, Dahlia Malkhi, Michael K Reiter, Chrysoula Stathakopoulou, Michael Wei, Maofan Yin
• BFT-PoLoc: A Byzantine Fortified Trigonometric Proof of Location Protocol using Internet Delays
  Peiyao Sheng, Vishal Sevani, Ranvir Rana, Himanshu Tyagi, Pramod Viswanath
• SAKSHI: Decentralized AI Platforms
  Suma Bhat, Canhui Chen, Zerui Cheng, Zhixuan Fang, Ashwin Hebbar, Sreeram Kannan, Ranvir Rana, Peiyao Sheng, Himanshu Tyagi, Pramod Viswanath, Xuechao Wang

Publications

• Unconditionally Safe Light Client
  Niusha Moshrefi, Peiyao Sheng, Soubhik Deb, Sreeram Kannan, Pramod Viswanath
  International Conference on Blockchain (ICBC), 2025.
• Proof of Diligence: Cryptoeconomic Security for Rollups
  Peiyao Sheng, Ranvir Rana, Himanshu Tyagi, Pramod Viswanath
  Advances in Financial Technologies (AFT), 2024.
• CFT-Forensics: High-Performance Byzantine Accountability for Crash Fault Tolerant Protocols
  Weizhao Tang, Peiyao Sheng, Pronoy Roy, Xuechao Wang, Giulia Fanti, Pramod Viswanath
  Advances in Financial Technologies (AFT), 2024.
• Proof of Backhaul: Trustfree Measurement of Broadband Bandwidth
  Peiyao Sheng, Nikita Yadav, Vishal Sevani, Arun Babu, SVR Anand, Himanshu Tyagi and Pramod Viswanath
  Network and Distributed System Security (NDSS) Symposium, 2024.
• TrustBoost: Boosting Trust among Interoperable Blockchains
  Peiyao Sheng, Xuechao Wang, Kartik Nayak, Sreeram Kannan and Pramod Viswanath
  ACM Conference on Computer and Communication Security (CCS), 2023.
• Player-Replaceability and Forensic Support are Two Sides of the Same (Crypto) Coin
  Peiyao Sheng, Gerui Wang, Kartik Nayak, Sreeram Kannan and Pramod Viswanath
  Financial Cryptography and Data Security (FC), 2023.
• Trust-free Service Measurement and Payments for Decentralized Cellular Networks
  S.V.R. Anand, Serhat Arslan, Rajat Chopra, Sachin Katti, Milind Kumar Vaddiraju, Ranvir Rana, Peiyao Sheng, Himanshu Tyagi, Pramod Viswanath (List of authors in alphabetical order.)
  The 21st ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks (HotNets ’22). 2022
• BFT Protocol Forensics

  Peiyao Sheng, Gerui Wang, Kartik Nayak, Sreeram Kannan and Pramod Viswanath

  ACM Conference on Computer and Communication Security (CCS), 2021.

  Best Paper Runner-Up
• ACeD: Scalable Data Availability Oracle  [Code]
  Peiyao Sheng, Bowen Xue, Sreeram Kannan and Pramod Viswanath
  Financial Cryptography and Data Security (FC), 2021.
• GANs for Children: a Generative Data Augmentation Strategy for Children Speech Recognition
  Peiyao Sheng, Zhuolin Yang, Yanmin Qian
  IEEE Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding Workshop (ASRU), 2019.
• Data Augmentation using Conditional Generative Adversarial Networks for Robust Speech Recognition
  Peiyao Sheng, Zhuolin Yang, Huhu, Tian Tan and Yanmin Qian
  International Symposium on Chinese Spoken Language Processing (ISCSLP), 2018.