Chenyuan Yang

Chenyuan Yang

PhD student at UIUC

About

I am Chenyuan Yang (杨晨源), a PhD student at UIUC advised by Prof. Lingming Zhang since 2022 Fall.

I received my B.S. degree with honors from the elite program in the Department of Computer Science & Technology at Nanjing University, advised by Prof. Yanyan Jiang.

My research covers the interaction of software systems and machine learning, with the goal of enhancing the reliability of large-scale systems. To this end, I leverage and optimize LLMs with testing, reasoning, and verification techniques. To date, my research has detected 630+ critical bugs for ML systems, C/C++ compilers, and operating systems, including 25 CVEs.

  • System Reliability for ML. Synthesizing diverse & high-quality tensor programs across inference (FreeFuzz, DeepREL), training (NablaFuzz), and optimization components (WhiteFox) in ML systems, along with test oracles.
  • ML for System Reliability.
    • LLM for Testing. Designing LLM-driven workflows to synthesize tests (TitanFuzz, WhiteFox), test generators (KernelGPT), and static analyzers (KNighter) for large-scale software systems. Evaluating LLMs’ code reasoning via test generation (TestEval).
    • LLM for Verification. Training and evaluating LLMs to generate verification proofs for code (AutoVerus).

Selected Publications

For a full list of publications, please refer to Publications.

  • [Preprint] KNighter: Transforming Static Analysis with LLM-Synthesized Checkers
    Chenyuan Yang, Zijie Zhao, Zichen Xie, Haoyu Li, Lingming Zhang
    (Preprint), Mar 2025. [paper] [code]
  • [Preprint] AutoVerus: Automated Proof Generation for Rust Code
    Chenyuan Yang, Xuheng Li, Md Rakib Hossain Misu, Jianan Yao, Weidong Cui, Yeyun Gong, Chris Hawblitzel, Shuvendu Lahiri, Jacob R. Lorch, Shuai Lu, Fan Yang, Ziqiao Zhou, Shan Lu
    (Preprint), Sept 2024. [website] [paper]
  • KernelGPT: Enhanced Kernel Fuzzing via Large Language Models
    Chenyuan Yang, Zijie Zhao, Lingming Zhang
    30th ACM International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems
    (ASPLOS 2025), March 2025. [paper] [code]
  • WhiteFox: White-box Compiler Fuzzing Empowered by Large Language Models
    Chenyuan Yang, Yinlin Deng, Runyu Lu, Jiayi Yao, Jiawei Liu, Reyhaneh Jabbarvand, Lingming Zhang
    Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications 2024 (in PACM PL)
    (OOPSLA 2024), Oct 2024. [paper] [code] [slides]
  • Large Language Models are Zero-Shot Fuzzers: Fuzzing Deep-Learning Libraries via Large Language Models
    Yinlin Deng, Chunqiu Steven Xia, Haoran Peng, Chenyuan Yang, Lingming Zhang
    32nd International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis
    (ISSTA 2023), July 2023. [paper]
  • Fuzzing Automatic Differentiation in Deep-Learning Libraries
    Chenyuan Yang, Yinlin Deng, Jiayi Yao, Yuxing Tu, Hanchi Li, Lingming Zhang
    45th International Conference on Software Engineering
    (ICSE 2023), May 2023. [paper] [code] [slides]

    • * denotes joint first authors

    Internships

    Microsoft Research, Systems Research Group Summmer 2024

    Google Labs, Project Starline Summmer 2023