Trustworthy AI through Knowledge and Optimization Lab

Directed by Prof. Zhe Zeng @ Department of Computer Science, University of Virginia

We perform research in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) with focus on neurosymbolic AI. Our goal is to enable and support decision-making in the real world in the presence of probabilistic uncertainty and symbolic knowledge (graph structures, logical, arithmetic, and physical constraints, etc) to achieve trustworthy AI and aid scientific discoveries.

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News

Aug 2026 funding

We received the DARPA CLARA grant! ✨
Apr 2026 paper

Two papers accepted to ICML 2026: ProbMoE: Differentiable Probabilistic Routing for Mixture-of-Experts and Automatic Layer Selection for Hallucination Detection 🎉
Apr 2026 paper

One paper accepted to NeSy 2026: Learning Deep Generative Models under Hard Linear Equality Constraints 🎉
Feb 2026 funding

We received the DAC award! ✨
Aug 2025 team

Welcome Zhizhen, Heng and Xinpeng to the group 🥳

Recent Publications

All publications →

Entropy-Guided LLM Decoding via Probabilistic Circuits

Zhizhen Chen, Daniel Mingyi Israel, Guy Van den Broeck, Zhe Zeng

UAI 2026 Workshop TPM , 2026

PDF

@inproceedings{
chen2026entropyguided,
title={Entropy-Guided {LLM} Decoding via Probabilistic Circuits},
author={Zhizhen Chen and Daniel Mingyi Israel and Guy Van den Broeck and Zhe Zeng},
booktitle={The Ninth Workshop on Tractable Probabilistic Models},
year={2026},
url={https://openreview.net/forum?id=orwlLyK403}
}

ProbMoE: Differentiable Probabilistic Routing for Mixture-of-Experts

Heng Zhao, Zilei Shao, Guy Van den Broeck, Zhe Zeng

International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) , 2026

PDF Poster Slides Code

@article{zhao2026probmoe,
  title   = {ProbMoE: Differentiable Probabilistic Routing for Mixture-of-Experts},
  author  = {Zhao, Heng and Shao, Zilei and Van den Broeck, Guy and Zeng, Zhe},
  journal = {arXiv preprint arXiv:2606.01509},
  year    = {2026}
}

Automatic Layer Selection for Hallucination Detection

Xinpeng Wang, William X. Cao, Andrew Gordon Wilson, Zhe Zeng

International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) , 2026

PDF Poster Slides Code

@article{wang2026automatic,
  title   = {Automatic Layer Selection for Hallucination Detection},
  author  = {Wang, Xinpeng and Cao, William X. and Wilson, Andrew Gordon and Zeng, Zhe},
  journal = {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.26366},
  year    = {2026}
}

Learning Deep Generative Models under Hard Linear Equality Constraints

Ruoyan Li, Dipti Ranjan Sahu, Guy Van den Broeck, Zhe Zeng

Proceedings of Machine Learning Research (PMLR) , 2026

PDF

@inproceedings{li2026learning,
  title     = {Learning Deep Generative Models under Hard Linear Equality Constraints},
  author    = {Li, Ruoyan and Sahu, Dipti Ranjan and Van den Broeck, Guy and Zeng, Zhe},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of Machine Learning Research (PMLR)},
  year      = {2026}
}