Junkai Chen’s Homepage

Introduction

I am Junkai Chen (陈俊凯), a Ph.D. student at Singapore Management University, advised by Prof. David Lo (ACM and IEEE Fellow). I received my master’s degree at Zhejiang University, advised by Prof. Xing Hu and Prof. Xin Xia (ACM Distinguished Member).

My research spans the intersection of Software Engineering, Artificial Intelligence, and Cybersecurity, and recently focused on AI agents and their applications. 🛫 Feel free to reach out to me if you are interested in my works!

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News

• [2026-06-18] Our paper about agentic partial execution was accepted by ASE 2026.
• [2026-04-16] Our paper about speculative decoding was accepted by ISSTA 2026.
• [2026-04-07] Two papers about AI and cybersecurity were accepted by ACL 2026.
• 📌 Check latest SE conference papers at SEConfPaperList~.

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Selected Publications

• SecureVibeBench: Benchmarking Secure Vibe Coding of AI Agents via Reconstructing Vulnerability-Introducing Scenarios
  Junkai Chen*, Huihui Huang*, Yunbo Lyu, Junwen An, Jieke Shi, Chengran Yang, Ting Zhang, Haoye Tian, Yikun Li, Zhenhao Li, Xin Zhou, Xing Hu, and David Lo.
  ACL 2026 The 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
  [PDF][Code][Dataset]

• AgentExecutor: Partial Code Execution via Agentic Context Generation
  Junkai Chen, Chengran Yang, Xing Hu, Zhenhao Li, Xin Xia, and David Lo.
  ASE 2026 The 41th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering
  

• Reasoning Runtime Behavior of a Program with LLM: How Far Are We?
  Junkai Chen*, Zhiyuan Pan*, Xing Hu, Zhenhao Li, Ge Li, and Xin Xia.
  ICSE 2025 The 47th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Software Engineering
  [PDF][Code][Dataset]
  🔥 Number 60 in Normalized Top-100 Software Engineering Conference Papers of all time.
  🤗 Adopted by JetBrains-Research.

• Code Search is All You Need? Improving Code Suggestions with Code Search
  Junkai Chen, Xing Hu, Zhenhao Li, Cuiyun Gao, Xin Xia, and David Lo.
  ICSE 2024 The 46th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Software Engineering
  [PDF][Code]
  🏆 ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award.

• R2Vul: Learning to Reason about Software Vulnerabilities with Reinforcement Learning and Structured Reasoning Distillation
  Martin Weyssow, Chengran Yang, Junkai Chen, Ratnadira Widyasari, Ting Zhang, Huihui Huang, Huu Hung Nguyen, Yan Naing Tun, Tan Bui, Yikun Li, Ang Han Wei, Frank Liauw, Eng Lieh Ouh, Lwin Khin Shar, and David Lo.
  Under review at TOSEM Under review at ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology
  [PDF][Code] 🔥 One of the top-liked papers in software engineering at alphaXiv.

• Assessing and Advancing Benchmarks for Evaluating Large Language Models in Software Engineering Tasks
  Xing Hu, Feifei Niu, Junkai Chen, Xin Zhou, Junwei Zhang, Junda He, Xin Xia, and David Lo.
  TOSEM 2026 ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology
  [PDF][Code]
  🔥 Featured by 新智元 (in Chinese).

• Understanding Practitioners’ Expectations on Clear Code Review Comments
  Junkai Chen*, Zhenhao Li*, Qiheng Mao, Xing Hu, Kui Liu, and Xin Xia.
  ISSTA 2025 The 34th ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis
  [PDF][Code]

• NLPerturbator: Studying the Robustness of Code LLMs to Natural Language Variations
  Junkai Chen*, Zhenhao Li*, Xing Hu, and Xin Xia.
  TOSEM 2025 ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology
  [PDF][Code]

Other Publications — click to expand

• Debt Behind the AI Boom: A Large-Scale Empirical Study of AI-Generated Code in the Wild
  Yue Liu, Ratnadira Widyasari, Yanjie Zhao, Ivana Clairine Irsan, Junkai Chen, David Lo
  Preprint
  [PDF]

• AgentSZZ: Teaching the LLM Agent to Play Detective with Bug-Inducing Commits
  Yunbo Lyu, Jieke Shi, Hong Jin Kang, Ratnadira Widyasari, Junda He, Yuqing Niu, Chengran Yang, Junkai Chen, Zhou Yang, Julia Lawall, and David Lo.
  Preprint
  [PDF]

• An Empirical Study of Speculative Decoding on Software Engineering Tasks
  Yijia Li, Junkai Chen, Xing Hu, and Xin Xia.
  ISSTA 2026 The 35th ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis
  [PDF]

• PenForge: On-the-Fly Expert Agent Construction for Automated Penetration Testing
  Huihui Huang, Jieke Shi, Junkai Chen, Ting Zhang, Yikun Li, Chengran Yang, Eng Lieh Ouh, Lwin Khin Shar, and David Lo.
  ICSE 2026 (NIER) The 48th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Software Engineering, New Ideas and Emerging Results
  [PDF][Code]

• SeCuRepair: Semantics-Aligned, Curriculum-Driven, and Reasoning-Enhanced Vulnerability Repair Framework
  Chengran Yang, Ting Zhang, Jinfeng Jiang, Xin Zhou, Haoye Tian, Mingzhe Du, Jieke Shi, Junkai Chen, Yikun Li, Eng Lieh Ouh, Lwin Khin Shar, and David Lo.
  ACL 2026 Main The 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
  [PDF] 🔥 SAC Highlight Award.

• Out of Distribution, Out of Luck: How Well Can LLMs Trained on Vulnerability Datasets Detect Top 25 CWE Weaknesses?
  Yikun Li, Ngoc Tan Bui, Ting Zhang, Chengran Yang, Xin Zhou, Martin Weyssow, Jinfeng Jiang, Junkai Chen, Huihui Huang, Huu Hung Nguyen, Chiok Yew Ho, Jie Tan, Ruiyin Li, Yide Yin, Han Wei Ang, Frank Liauw, Eng Lieh Ouh, Lwin Khin Shar, and David Lo.
  ICSE 2026 The 48th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Software Engineering
  [PDF][Code]

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Awards

• ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award, ACM SIGSOFT, 2024
• National Scholarship, Ministry of Education of P.R.C., 2024
• SMU SCIS Research Excellence Award, SMU, 2025, 2026
• ACM SIGSOFT CAPS Travel Grant, 2025

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Services

Program Committee / Journal Reviewer

• 2026: NeurIPS, TOSEM, IST, ICSE (Shadow PC), MSR (Junior PC), DL4C@NeurIPS, EASE (AI Models / Data Track), Communications AI & Computing
• 2025: MSR (Junior PC), DL4C@ICLR, LTB@ICPE

Others

• External Reviewer: ICSE, FSE, ASE, TOSEM, MSR, FCS, JSS (Chinese), etc.
• Student Volunteer: Internetware 2023