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Dominik Winterer

Postdoctoral Researcher
Institute for Programming Languages & Systems Department of Computer Science
ETH Zurich, Switzerland

Email: dominik.winterer@inf.ethz.ch
Office: CNB H 108

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About

I am a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Programming Languages and Systems at ETH Zurich. Starting in November, I will be working with Prof. Michael Kokologiannakis. I got my Ph.D. from ETH Zurich advised by Prof. Zhendong Su and was a member of the AST lab from March 2019 to September 2024.

I am interested in formal methods problems in Programming Languages and Software Engineering. Before my Ph.D. studies, I did undergraduate research in Automated Planning. In 2018, I received an MSc. in computer science from the University of Freiburg (Germany) and in the summer of 2017. From October 2023 to February 2024, I was interning in the Automated Reasoning Group of AWS where I applied and further developed testing techniques for SMT solvers and and in the summer of 2017, I interned at IBM Research Yorktown Heights. interned at IBM Research Yorktown Heights.
My primary research goal is to make SMT solvers more robust, reliable, and performant through principled, general automated testing techniques. My tools have found 1,800+ bugs in the flagship SMT solvers Z3 and CVC5; 500+ are critical soundness bugs.

News

Oct '24   Released enumerative testing tool ET v1.0.0!
Sep '24  Invited to give a talk in the SI Seminar Series at USI Lugano on Feb 27, 2025
Sep '24  I graduated my Ph.D. from ETH Zurich! [X post]
Jun '24  Work on formula enumeration to understand SMT solvers' correctness & performance cond. accepted at OOPSLA '24!
Apr '24  I was invited to serve as a reviewer for ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology!
Feb '24  I was invited to give talks at UPenn and Harvard!
Sep '23   I'll be interning in the Automated Reasoning Group of AWS in NY beginning October!
Aug '23   Invited to serve as Artifact Evaluation Co-Chair of ISSTA 2024!

Research Projects

symbol Project Yin-Yang for SMT Solver Testing. Satisfiability Modulo Theory (SMT) solvers are foundational tools for many subareas of computer science, including formal verification, programming languages, and software engineering. Their reliability and robustness are crucial, especially for the safety-critical domains. However, effectively validating SMT solvers has been a longstanding challenge. The goal of Project Yin-Yang is to develop novel, effective, practical methods and techniques to help make SMT solvers more reliable, powerful, and usable.

[Z3/CVC4/5 Bugs: 1,825 (total) / 1,333 (fixed)]
[Reports: YinYang, OpFuzz,TypeFuzz, Janus]

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Selected Publications (all)

  1. Validating SMT Solvers for Correctness and Performance via Grammar-based Enumeration
    Dominik Winterer, Zhendong Su
    In Proceedings of SPLASH/OOPSLA 2024

      ⭐ Bounded Validation of the SMT Solvers Z3 and cvc5

  2. Finding and Understanding Incompleteness Bugs in SMT Solvers
    Mauro Bringolf, Dominik Winterer, Zhendong Su
    In Proceedings of ASE 2022   [slides / tool]

  3. Generative Type-Aware Mutation for Testing SMT Solvers badge_available badge_reusalbe badge_functional
    Jiwon Park*, Dominik Winterer*, Chengyu Zhang, Zhendong Su
    In Proceedings of SPLASH/OOPSLA 2021   [slides / video abstract]
    * Both authors contributed equally.

  4. On the Unusual Effectiveness of Type-Aware Mutations for Testing SMT Solvers
    Dominik Winterer*, Chengyu Zhang*, Zhendong Su
    In Proceedings of SPLASH/OOPSLA 2020   [slides / video abstract]
    * Both authors contributed equally.

      ⭐ 1,000+ bugs in the SMT Solvers Z3 and CVC4

  5. Validating SMT Solvers via Semantic Fusion
    Dominik Winterer*, Chengyu Zhang*, Zhendong Su
    In Proceedings of PLDI 2020   [slides / video abstract]
    * Both authors contributed equally.

    🏆 ACM Distinguished Paper Award

    Invited to ACM TOPLAS Special Issue

Awards and Grants

Supervised Students

Invited Talks

Service

Teaching

@ETH Zurich

@University of Konstanz

@University of Freiburg