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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 ISSTA 2026, FSE 2026, ISSRE 2025, PAKDD 2026/2025, 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.
CV / Google Scholar / CMS Profile / Github / ORCID / Twitter
News
09/2025, I’m serving on the program committee for ISSTA 2026. Please consider submitting your work! 07/2025, I’m serving on the program committee for FSE 2026. Please consider submitting your work! 04/2025, Our work on recursion dissection in abstract interpretation accepted at ECOOP 2025. Congrats to Jiawei Yang! 06/2024, We're honored to receive the Distinguished Paper Award at FSE. Thanks to the community for recognizing our work! 01/2024, Our work on quantum speedups on dynamic transitive closure-based static analysis accepted at TOSEM. 01/2024, Our work on path-sensitive typestate analysis accepted at FSE 2024. 12/2023, Our work on cross-domain abstract execution accepted at ICSE 2024.Publications
(# Equal contribution, * Corresponding author)
Preprints
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[P2] Flow Sensitivity without Control Flow Graph: An Efficient Andersen-Style Flow-Sensitive Pointer Analysis
Jiahao Zhang#, Xiao Cheng#, Yuxiang Lei.
arXiv PDF - [P1] Tracing Errors, Constructing Fixes: Repository-Level Memory Error Repair via Typestate-Guided Context Retrieval
Xiao Cheng#, Zhihao Guo#, Huan Huo, Yulei Sui.
arXiv PDF
Selected Publications
- [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 - [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 - [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
Full List
(expand to view)
Published Papers
- [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
Services
Teaching Experience
Tools
(authored by Yulei Sui), a source code analysis framework that enables interprocedural dependence analysis for LLVM-based languages.
, a graph neural network based software vulnerability detector.