I am an associate professor in the Software Engineering Group lead by Prof. Xuandong Li at Nanjing University. I received my Ph.D degree at Nanyang Technological University supervised by Prof. Yang Liu. My post-doc research also finished at NTU supervised by Prof. Liu (2023-2024). My research mainly lies in intelligent software engineering including but not limited to AI-based software vulnerability detection and repair (NeurIPS19, ASE22, FSE23, TOSEM25, FSE25), intelligent programming assistant (ICLR21, ICSE23, ASE23, ISSTA24, TOSEM24, ICSE25) and code model analysis (ACL23, TOSEM24, ICSE24, ASE24).

I am looking for motivated master and Ph.D students. Please send me an email with your CV if you are interested.

News

• (04/2025) Our paper “Demystifying Memorization in LLM-based Program Repair via a General Hypothesis Testing Framework” is accepted by FSE25.
• (02/2025) Our paper “ContrastRepair: Enhancing Conversation-Based Automated Program Repair via Contrastive Test Case Pairs” is accepted by TOSEM.
• (01/2025) Our paper “Intention is All You Need: Refining Your Code from Your Intention” is accepted by ICSE25.
• (10/2024) Our paper “SpecGen: Automated Generation of Formal Program Specifications via Large Language Models” is accepted by ICSE25.
• (08/2024) Congrats to my dear wife Prof. Han at SouthEast University for receiving the National Science Foundation of China for Excellent Young Scholars (国家优青).
• (08/2024) Two papers are accepted by ASE24.
• (07/2024) Our paper “RATCHET: Retrieval Augmented Transformer for Program Repair” is accepted by ISSRE24.
• (07/2024) Our paper “Combining Fine-Tuning and LLM-based Agents for Intuitive Smart Contract Auditing with Justifications” is accepted by ICSE25.
• (06/2024) Our paper “Automated Commit Intelligence by Pre-training” is accepted by TOSEM.
• (04/2024) Our paper “Unveiling Code Pre-Trained Models: Investigating Syntax and Semantics Capacities” is accepted by TOSEM.
• (04/2024) Our paper “Enhancing Code Vulnerability Detection via Vulnerability-Preserving Data Augmentation” is accepted by LCTES24.
• (03/2024) Our paper “FT2Ra: A Fine-Tuning-Inspired Approach to Retrieval-Augmented Code Completion” is accepted by ISSTA24.
• (01/2024) Our paper “BadEdit: Backdooring Large Language Models by Model Editing” is accepted by ICLR24.
• (10/2023) Our paper “A Black-Box Attack on Code Models via Representation Nearest Neighbor Search” is accepted by Findings of EMNLP23.
• (09/2023) Our paper “Domain Adaptive Code Completion via Language Models and Decoupled Domain Databases” won ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award (ASE23).
• (08/2023) Our paper “Exploring the Potential of ChatGPT in Automated Code Refinement: An Empirical Study” is accepted by ICSE24.
• (07/2023) Our paper “Learning Program Semantics for Vulnerability Detection via Vulnerability-specific Inter-procedural Slicing” is accepted by ESEC/FSE23.
• (07/2023) Two papers are accepted by ASE23.
• (05/2023) Our paper “Multi-target Backdoor Attacks for Code Pre-trained Models” is accepted by ACL23.
• (12/2022) Our paper “GraphSearchNet: Enhancing GNNs via Capturing Global Dependencies for Semantic Code Search” is accepted by TSE.
• (12/2022) Our paper “Learning Program Representations with a Tree-Structured Transformer” is accepted by SANER23.
• (12/2022) Our paper “ContraBERT: Enhancing Code Pre-trained Models via Contrastive Learning” is accepted by ICSE23.
• (08/2022) Our paper “TransRepair: Context-aware Program Repair for Compilation Errors” is accepted by ASE22.
• (08/2022) Join ICLR 2023, AAAI 2023 as reviewers.
• (07/2022) Our paper “Enhancing Security Patch Identification by Capturing Structures in Commits” is accepted by TDSC.
• (04/2022) I have submitted my Ph.D thesis “Learning program semantics via exploring program structures with deep learning”.
• (03/2022) Join NeurIPS 2022 as reviewers.
• (01/2022) Join ICML 2022 as reviewers.
• (12/2021）Our paper “Learning Program Semantics with Code Representations: An Empirical Study” is accepted by SANER 2022.
• (06/2021) Join ICLR 2022 as reviewers.
• (05/2021) Our paper “SPI: Automated Identification of Security Patches via Commits” is accepted by TOSEM.
• (04/2021) Join NeurIPS 2021 as reviewers.
• (01/2021) Our paper “Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Code Summarization via Hybrid GNN” is accepted by ICLR 2021 (spotlight).