Ziyi Guan
Starting in July 2026, I will be a Swiss NSF Postdoc.Mobility fellow and postdoctoral researcher at MIT and NYU. I will be hosted by Yael Kalai and Vinod Vaikuntanathan at MIT, and by Nir Bitansky and Benedikt Bünz at NYU.
I received my Ph.D. from EPFL in 2026, where I was advised by Alessandro Chiesa and Mika Göös. I received a B.S. in Computer Science and a B.S. in Mathematical Sciences from Carnegie Mellon University in 2020.
I am interested in theoretical computer science, particularly probabilistic proof systems, cryptography, complexity theory and quantum computing.
Papers
Talks
Succinct arguments are fundamental cryptographic primitives with wide-ranging applications. A common approach to build succinct arguments is from probabilistic proofs, dating back to Kilian's protocol that combines a PCP and a Merkle tree.
In this talk, I will present the tightest bound on the regular security of Kilian's protocol and show how to obtain similar bounds for more general argument systems, such as those based on polynomial commitment schemes. I'll conclude with results that achieve post-quantum security and Fiat-Shamir security for general classes of arguments.