Peiyao Sheng

I am a Researcher at Sentient Labs, working on post-training and evaluation of LLMs and agents. My research interests span verifiable reasoning, agent security, and model fingerprinting.

Before focusing on AI, I worked on the security and accountability of decentralized systems. I co-founded Witness Chain and built its research foundation on a verifiable physical trust stack. That background shapes how I approach models and agents today: verifying their context and behavior instead of taking them on trust.

I received my Ph.D. in Computer Science from UIUC, advised by Prof. Pramod Viswanath, and was a visiting researcher at Princeton University. I interned at Chainlink Labs with Prof. Dahlia Malkhi. I received my B.S. from the ACM Honors Class, Zhiyuan College, Shanghai Jiao Tong University.

News

• Sep 2026 Paper on cross-user poisoning in multi-user language agents accepted to NeurIPS 2026.
• Sep 2026🏆 Representation-aligned auxiliary supervision received the Outstanding Runner-Up Award at the NeurIPS 2026 LP4FM Workshop.
• Sep 2026 Verifiable process supervision for LLMs accepted to COLM 2026.
• Sep 2026Our LLM fingerprinting leaderboard is now live 🔍.
• Aug 2026New preprint: Hallucinations on the Board.
• Apr 2026New preprint on verifiable process supervision.
• Mar 2026Presented our context manipulation attacks on Web3 agents at FC 2026 · St. Kitts.
• Jan 2026Talked about LiveCodeBench Pro at the 31st SJTU AAA Alumni Academic Webinar.

Publications

† Co-mentored project

AI & Language Models

• Cross-User Poisoning: User-Task Boundary Failures in Multi-User Collaborative Language Agents
  Atharv Singh Patlan, Peiyao Sheng^†, S. Ashwin Hebbar, Prateek Mittal, Pramod Viswanath
  Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2026
• Correct Answers from Sound Reasoning: Verifiable Process Supervision for Language Models
  Kyuyoung Kim, Kevin Wang, Yunfei Xie, Peiyang Xu, Peiyao Sheng, Chen Wei, Zhangyang Wang, Jinwoo Shin, Pramod Viswanath, Sewoong Oh
  Conference on Language Modeling (COLM), 2026
• Representation-Aligned Auxiliary Supervision for Language Model Adaptation
  Kyuyoung Kim, Peiyao Sheng^†, Ashwin Hebbar, Peiyang Xu, Yunfei Xie, Kevin Wang, Rui Xin, Chen Wei, Zhangyang Wang, Jinwoo Shin, Pramod Viswanath, Sewoong Oh
  NeurIPS 2026 Workshop on Linguistic Principles for Foundation Models
  🏆 Outstanding Runner-Up Award
• Hallucinations on the Board: Tool-Augmented Evaluation of LLM Chess Commentary
  Ashwin Hebbar, Peiyao Sheng^†, Sewoong Oh, Pramod Viswanath
  Preprint 2026
• 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
  Financial Cryptography and Data Security (FC), 2026
• 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
  Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2025
• Scalable Fingerprinting of Large Language Models
  Anshul Nasery, Jonathan Hayase, Creston Brooks, Peiyao Sheng, Himanshu Tyagi, Pramod Viswanath, Sewoong Oh
  Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2025
• CHANCERY: Evaluating Corporate Governance Reasoning Capabilities in Language Models
  Lucas Irwin, Arda Kaz, Peiyao Sheng^†, Pramod Viswanath
  Preprint 2025
• 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, Hu Hu, Tian Tan, Yanmin Qian
  International Symposium on Chinese Spoken Language Processing (ISCSLP), 2018

Decentralized Systems & Security

• Unconditionally Safe Light Client
  Niusha Moshrefi, Peiyao Sheng^†, Soubhik Deb, Sreeram Kannan, Pramod Viswanath
  International Conference on Blockchain (ICBC), 2025
  🏆 Best Paper Award
• On Orchestrating Parallel Broadcasts for Distributed Ledgers
  Peiyao Sheng, Chenyuan Wu, Dahlia Malkhi, Michael K. Reiter, Chrysoula Stathakopoulou, Michael Wei, Maofan Yin
  Preprint 2024
• 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
• BFT-PoLoc: A Byzantine Fortified Trigonometric Proof of Location Protocol using Internet Delays
  Peiyao Sheng, Vishal Sevani, Ranvir Rana, Himanshu Tyagi, Pramod Viswanath
  Preprint 2024
• Proof of Backhaul: Trustfree Measurement of Broadband Bandwidth
  Peiyao Sheng, Nikita Yadav, Vishal Sevani, Arun Babu, SVR Anand, Himanshu Tyagi, Pramod Viswanath
  Network and Distributed System Security (NDSS) Symposium, 2024
• 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
  Preprint 2023
• TrustBoost: Boosting Trust among Interoperable Blockchains
  Peiyao Sheng, Xuechao Wang, Kartik Nayak, Sreeram Kannan, Pramod Viswanath
  ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS), 2023
• Player-Replaceability and Forensic Support are Two Sides of the Same (Crypto) Coin
  Peiyao Sheng, Gerui Wang, Kartik Nayak, Sreeram Kannan, 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 (alphabetical order)
  ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks (HotNets), 2022
• BFT Protocol Forensics
  Peiyao Sheng, Gerui Wang, Kartik Nayak, Sreeram Kannan, Pramod Viswanath
  ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS), 2021
  🏆 Best Paper Runner-Up
• ACeD: Scalable Data Availability Oracle  [Code]
  Peiyao Sheng, Bowen Xue, Sreeram Kannan, Pramod Viswanath
  Financial Cryptography and Data Security (FC), 2021