About

I’m a third-year computer science Ph.D. student working under the advisory of Dr. Taylor T. Johnson in the VeriVITAL lab. I am primarily focused on developing new techniques in computer-aided verification for machine learning-based systems, thinking about what safety specifications make sense in the context of autonomous systems, and combining ideas from classical computing with deep learning to create neurosymbolic techniques to improve efficiency, performance, and interpretability of neural network-based solutions.

Contact: samuel.sasaki@vanderbilt.edu

Publications

• [NeurIPS'25]Navid Hashemi, Samuel Sasaki, Ipek Oguz, Meiyi Ma, Taylor T. Johnson. Scaling Data-Driven Probabilistic Robustness Analysis for Semantic Segmentation Neural Networks. The 39th Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS'25), December 2-7, 2025, San Diego, California.
• [ESORICS'25]Preston Robinette, Thuy Dung Nguyen, Samuel Sasaki. Taylor T. Johnson. Trigger-Based Fragile Model Watermarking for Image Transformation Networks. 30th European Symposium on Research in Computer Security (ESORICS'25), September 22-26, 2025, Toulouse, France.
• [SAIV'25]Diego Manzanas Lopez, Samuel Sasaki, Taylor T. Johnson. NNV: A Star Set Reachability Approach. The 8th International Symposium on AI Verification (SAIV'25), July 21-22, 2025, Zagreb, Croatia.
• [NeuS'25]Samuel Sasaki, Diego Manzanas Lopez, Taylor T. Johnson. Neurosymbolic Finite and Pushdown Automata: Improved Multimodal Reasoning versus Vision Language Models (VLMs). 2nd International Conference on Neuro-symbolic Systems (NeuS'25), May 28-30, 2025, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
• [FormaliSE'25]Samuel Sasaki, Preston K. Robinette, Diego Manzanas Lopez, Taylor T. Johnson. Robustness Verification of Video Classification Neural Networks. 2025 IEEE/ACM 13th International Conference on Formal Methods in Software Engineering (FormaliSE'25), April 27-28, 2025, Ottawa, Canada. 31% Acceptance Rate (15/48).

Service

Reviewing

[QEST+FORMATS’25] Member of the artifact evaluate commmittee.

Teaching

Teaching assistant for the Introduction to Engineering - Computer Science course at Vanderbilt University in Fall 2023. Responsibilities included holding office hours, grading assignments, and assisting in-class activities.

Teaching assistant for the Embedded Systems course at Vanderbilt University in Spring 2024. Responsibilities included leading weekly lab sections in which students would work through assignments, managing distribution of equipment, and grading assignments.