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Xiao Cheng

Xiao Cheng is a lecturer (~U.S.Assistant Professor) at School of Computing, Faculty of Science and Engineering, Macquarie University. His research lies at the intersection of Programming Languages (PL) and Software Engineering (SE), focusing on enhancing the security and reliability of modern software systems through program analysis and verification techniques, including abstract interpretation, typestate analysis, IFDS, sparse value-flow analysis and fuzz testing. He is also exploring the integration of artificial intelligence, such as graph neural networks, language models and uncertainty quantification, with classical PL/SE tasks to further enhance these domains.

His papers have been published in top-tier conferences and journals in the field of software engineering (TOSEM, FSE, ICSE, ISSTA), programming languages (OOPSLA) and security (TDSC), and awarded ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award for FSE 2024 and ACM SIGPLAN Distinguished Paper Award for OOPSLA 2020. He is one of the major contributors of the SVF project and the author of the DeepWukong project. He is serving or has served as TPC member for ICSE 2027, ASE 2026, ISSTA 2026, FSE 2026, ISSRE 2025, PAKDD 2026/2025, ACISP 2026, APSEC 2025 (SEIP), LMPL 2025, FSE 2025 (SRC), ISSRE 2024 (DS track), and artifact evaluation committee members for ICSE 2025, ISSTA 2024/2023, SAS 2023 and FormaliSE 2025/2024/2023.

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(# Equal contribution,  * Corresponding author)

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Published Papers

  • [C12] TLR: Codebase-Level C Memory Management Error Repair with Large Language Models CORE-A* CCF-A
    Xiao Cheng#, Zhihao Guo#, Huan Huo, Yulei Sui.
    ACM International Conference on the Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE '26) (acceptance rate: 87/920=9.46%) PDF Slides
  • [C11] SpecGuru: Hierarchical LLM-Driven API Points-to Specification Generation with Self-Validation CORE-A* CCF-A
    Shuangxiang Kan, Yuekang Li, Xiao Cheng*, Yulei Sui.
    Proceedings of the IEEE/ACM 48th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE '26) PDF Slides BIB
  • [C10] Efficient Abstract Interpretation via Selective Widening CORE-A CCF-A
    Jiawei Wang#, Xiao Cheng#, Yulei Sui.
    Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages, Volume 9, Issue OOPSLA2 (OOPSLA '25) PDF Slides BIB
  • [C9] Taming and Dissecting Recursions through Interprocedural Weak Topological Ordering CORE-A CCF-B
    Jiawei Yang#, Xiao Cheng#, Bor-Yuh Evan Chang, Xiapu Luo, Yulei Sui.
    2025 European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP '25) PDF Slides BIB
  • [C8] Mitigating Emergent Malware Label Noise in DNN-Based Android Malware Detection CORE-A* CCF-A
    Haodong Li#, Xiao Cheng#, Guohan Zhang*, Guosheng Xu, Guoai Xu and Haoyu Wang*.
    FSE 2025 (acceptance rate: 70/612=11.44%) PDF Slides BIB
  • [C7] Understanding Model Weaknesses: A Path to Strengthening DNN-Based Android Malware Detection CORE-A* CCF-A
    Haodong Li, Xiao Cheng*, Yanjie Zhao, Guosheng Xu, Guoai Xu and Haoyu Wang*.
    ISSTA 2025 (acceptance rate: 23/553=4.16%) PDF Slides BIB
  • [J3] Dynamic Transitive Closure-Based Static Analysis through the Lens of Quantum Search CORE-A* CCF-A
    Jiawei Ren, Yulei Sui, Xiao Cheng, Yuan Feng and Jianjun Zhao
    ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (TOSEM) PDF BIB
  • [C6] Fast Graph Simplification for Path-Sensitive Typestate Analysis through Tempo-Spatial Multi-Point Slicing CORE-A* CCF-A ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper AWARD
    Xiao Cheng, Jiawei Ren, Yulei Sui
    32nd ACM International Conference on the Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE '24) PDF Slides BIB
  • [C5] Precise Sparse Abstract Execution via Cross-Domain Interaction CORE-A* CCF-A
    Xiao Cheng, Jiawei Wang, Yulei Sui
    46th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE '24) PDF Slides BIB
  • [C4] Vulnerability Detection via Typestate-Guided Code Representation Learning CCF-C
    Xiao Cheng
    International Conference on Formal Engineering Methods (ICFEM '23) PDF BIB
  • [J2] How About Bug-Triggering Paths? - Understanding and Characterizing Learning-Based Vulnerability Detectors CORE-A* CCF-A
    Xiao Cheng, Xu Nie, Ningke Li, Haoyu Wang, Zheng Zheng, Yulei Sui
    IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing (TDSC) PDF BIB
  • [C3] Path-Sensitive Code Embedding via Contrastive Learning for Software Vulnerability Detection CORE-A* CCF-A
    Xiao Cheng, Guanqin Zhang, Haoyu Wang and Yulei Sui
    The 31st ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis (ISSTA '22) PDF Slides BIB
  • [J1] DeepWukong: Statically Detecting Software Vulnerabilities using Deep Graph Neural Network CORE-A* CCF-A
    Xiao Cheng, Haoyu Wang*, Jiayi Hua, Guoai Xu* and Yulei Sui
    ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (TOSEM) PDF BIB
  • [C2] Flow2Vec: Value-Flow-Based Precise Code Embedding CORE-A* CCF-A ACM SIGPLAN Distinguished Paper AWARD
    Yulei Sui, Xiao Cheng, Guanqin Zhang and Haoyu Wang
    Proceedings of ACM OOPSLA 2020 PDF BIB
  • [C1] Static Detection of Control-Flow-Related Vulnerabilities Using Graph Embedding CORE-A CCF-C
    Xiao Cheng, Haoyu Wang*, Jiayi Hua, Miao Zhang, Guoai Xu, Li Yi* and Yulei Sui
    The 24th International Conference on Engineering of Complex Computer Systems (ICECCS 2019) PDF BIB

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