Zhou YANG (杨 洲) [Pronunciation]

About Me [⬆TOP]

Currently, I am a Senior Research Engineer and doing PhD at SMU. I am a member of Software Analytics Research Group, supervised by Prof. David LO. My main focus is "beyond accuracy of language models of code." I study a broad of properties including robustness, security, privacy, efficiency, fairness and usability of code model ecosystem.

I also have publication records in the general AI testing, including evaluating correctness of ASR systems, fairness of NLP models, security threats in reinforcement learning models, etc.

Our group and I are open to collaboration and communication.

I was a MSc student at University College London, studying Software System Engineering. My master dissertation is about automated program repair for syntax errors, which is co-supervised by Prof. Earl Barr (UCL) and Prof. Martin Monperrus (KTH).

I obtained my bachelor in software engineering from Yangzhou University, China (Yes, very interesting, I have the same name as my university!) I was member of the Elite class of Innovation and Entrepreneurship and selected as the outstanding graduate. At the same time of guaranteeing 1st GPA, I also served as the leader of two university-level student organisations. I had a very enjoyable and memorable time here.

News [⬆TOP]

• [2025.01] One paper (on monitor RL systems at runtime) is accepted by ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology!
• [2024.12] Happy to be the PC member of ICSE 2026 Technical Track, FSE 2025 Demonstration Track, and ISSTA 2025 Demonstration Track!
• [2024.12] I have defended my PhD thesis and now become Dr. Yang!
• [2024.11] One paper (on prioritizing speech test cases) is accepted by ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology!
• [2024.10] One paper (on greening code LLMs) is accepted by ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology!
• [2024.10] One paper (on infering membership inforamtion of code LLMs) is accepted by IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering!
• [2024.10] I won the SMU Research Staff Excellence Awards🏆, only 4 winners across the whole SMU!
• [2024.09] Our systematic literature review of LLM4Code is accepted by ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology!
• [2024.09] Our paper won the ACM Distinguish Paper Award🏆 from ISSTA 2024!
• [2024.07] I recieved the Distinguish Reviewer Award from Internetware 2024!
• [2024.07] One paper is accepted by ACM ISSTA 2024!
• [2024.06] I'm honored to win the SMU Presidential Fellowship Award🏆 and SMU Dean's List Award🏆!
• [2024.05] One paper is accepted by Software Engineering 2030!
• [2024.04] I'm honored to win the 1st Place in ACM Student Research Competition🏆 in ICSE 2024!
• [2024.04] I'm honored to be promoted to Senior Research Enigneer!

Selected Publications [Full list] [⬆TOP]

📧 means that I'm the corresponding author.

1. Hotfixing Large Language Models for Code
   Zhou Yang and David Lo.
   Under review.
2. Ecosystem of Large Language Models for Code
   Zhou Yang, Jieke, Premkumar Devanbu and David Lo.
   Under review.
3. Robustness, Security, Privacy, Explainability, Efficiency, and Usability of Large Language Models for Code
   Zhou Yang, Zhensu Sun, Terry Yue Zhuo, Premkumar Devanbu, and David Lo.
   Under review.
4. Gotcha! This Model Uses My Code! Evaluating Membership Leakage Risks in Code Models
   Zhou Yang, Zhipeng Zhao, Chenyu Wang, Jieke Shi, Dongsun Kim, DongGyun Han, David Lo.
   IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering.
5. Unveiling Memorization in Code Models
   Zhou Yang, Zhipeng Zhao, Chenyu Wang, Jieke Shi, Dongsun Kim, DongGyun Han, David Lo.
   The 46th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2024) (13 Pages, Technical Track)
   [Slides]
6. Natural Attack for Pre-trained Models of Code
   Zhou Yang, Jieke Shi, Junda He and David Lo.
   2022 IEEE/ACM 44th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE). (12 pages, Technical Track.)
7. Revisiting Neuron Coverage Metrics and Quality of Deep Neural Networks
   Zhou Yang, Jieke Shi, Muhammad Hilmi Asyrofi and David Lo.
   2022 IEEE 29th International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution and Reengineering (SANER). (12 pages)
8. Stealthy Backdoor Attack for Code Models
   Zhou Yang, Bowen Xu, Jie M Zhang, Hong Jin Kang, Jieke Shi, Junda He, David Lo.
   IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering.
9. Prioritizing Speech Test Cases
   Zhou Yang, Jieke Shi, Hilmi Asyrofi, Bowen Xu, Xin Zhou, DongGyun Han, David Lo.
   ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology.
10. What Do Users Ask in Open-Source AI Repositories? An Empirical Study of GitHub Issues
    Zhou Yang, Chenyu Wang, Jieke Shi et al.
    The 20th IEEE International Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR 2023) (12 pages, Technical Track.)
11. BiasRV: Uncovering biased sentiment predictions at runtime
    Zhou Yang, Muhammad Hilmi Asyrofi, David Lo.
    The 29th ACM Joint Meeting on European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE 2021) (Tool Demo.)
12. Incbl: Incremental bug localization
    Zhou Yang, Jieke Shi, Shaowei Wang, David Lo.
    The 36th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software (FSE 2021) (ASE Demo.)
13. Finding Safety Violations of AI-Enabled Control Systems through the Lens of Synthesized Proxy Programs
    Jieke Shi, Zhou Yang📧, Junda He, Bowen Xu, Dongsun Kim, Donggyun Han, and David Lo.
    ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology.
14. Greening Large Language Models of Code
    Jieke Shi, Zhou Yang📧, Hong Jin Kang, Bowen Xu, Junda He, David Lo.
    The 46th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE) (12 pages, SEIS Track.)
15. Curiosity-Driven Testing for Sequential Decision-Making Process
    Junda He, Zhou Yang📧, Jieke Shi et al.
    The 46th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2024) (13 Pages, Technical Track)
16. Curiosity-Driven and Victim-Aware Adversarial Policies
    Chen Gong, Zhou Yang📧, Yunpeng Bai, et al.
    The Annual Computer Security Applications Conference (ACSAC 2022) (15 pages, Technical Track.)
    [Honorable Mention Award]
17. Compressing Pre-trained Models of Code into 3 MB
    Jieke Shi, Zhou Yang, Bowen Xu, Hong Jin Kang, David Lo
    The 37th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering. (ASE 2022) (12 pages, Research Track.)
    [Nomination for Distinguish Paper Award]
18. Efficient and Green Large Language Models for Software Engineering: Vision and the Road Ahead
    Jieke Shi, Zhou Yang, David Lo
    ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology
19. Mind Your Data! Hiding Backdoors in Offline Reinforcement Learning Datasets
    Chen Gong, Zhou Yang📧, Yunpeng Bai et al.
    45th IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (S&P 2024).
20. BiasFinder: Metamorphic Test Generation to Uncover Bias for Sentiment Analysis Systems
    Asyrofi Hilmi, Zhou Yang📧, Imam Nur Bani Yusuf, Hong Jin Kang, Ferdian Thung, and David Lo.
    IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering.
21. Assessing AI Detectors in Identifying AI-Generated Code: Implications for Education
    Wei Hung Pan, Ming Jie Chok, Jonathan Wong, Yung Xin Shin, Yeong Shian Poon, Zhou Yang📧 et al.
    The 46th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2024)
    [Undergraduate project with students from Monash University Malaysia]
22. Synthesizing Speech Test Cases with Text-to-Speech? An Empirical Study on the False Alarms in Automated Speech Recognition Testing
    Julia Lau, Kelvin Kong, Julian Hao Yong, Per Hoong Tan, Zhou Yang📧 et al.
    ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis (ISSTA 2023)
    [Undergraduate project with students from Monash University Malaysia]
23. Adversarial Attacks on Code Models with Discriminative Graph Patterns
    Thanh-Dat Nguyen, Zhou Yang📧, Xuan Bach D Le, David Lo
    Under revision of ACM TOSEM.
24. AI Coders Are Among Us: Rethinking Programming Language Grammar Towards Efficient Code Generation
    Zhensu Sun, Xiaoning Du, Zhou Yang, Li Li, David Lo
    ISSTA 2024 (13 pages, Technical Track.)
    [ACM Distinguish Paper Award]
25. Large Language Models for Software Engineering: A Systematic Literature Review
    Xinyi Hou, Yanjie Zhao, Yue Liu, Zhou Yang, Kailong Wang, Li Li, Xiapu Luo, David Lo, John Grundy, Haoyu Wang.
    ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology.
    [PDF]

Services [⬆TOP]

Awards [⬆TOP]

• ACM Distinguish Paper Award, ISSTA 2024
• Distinguish Reviewer Award, Internetware 2024
• SMU Research Staff Excellence Awards 2024
• SMU Presidential Doctoral Fellowship, SMU Dean's list 2024
• 1st Place in ACM Student Research Competition at ICSE, 2024
• SANER Student Travel Grant, 2023
• SMU Presidential Doctoral Fellowship, 2022
• The Zhu Jing Wen Scholarship (Awarded to top 1 student in class with higher standard), 2017
• The First Level President Scholarship (Awarded to top 1 student in class), 2016

Student Supervision [⬆TOP]

As a PhD student, my duty is to conduct great research and publish high-quality papers. As a senior research engineer in the group, my duty is to help other research engineers and students thrive and succeed. I'm honored to (co-)supervise the following students: