Yang Chen

Yang Chen

CS PhD student @UIUC

About me

Hi! I am a PhD student in Computer Science at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign since 2022 fall. I am co-advised by Prof. Reyhaneh Jabbarvand and Prof. Darko Marinov.

My research interests:

  • AI coding agents, agentic AI systems, LLM evaluation and code reasoning, LLM fine-tuning and post-training.
  • AI and software engineering, synthetic data generation, software testing (flaky test detection & repair, mutation testing), and genetic algorithms.

My work has been published at multiple top SE venues (FSE, ICSE, ISSTA, TSE, etc.).

Experience

  • Applied Scientist Intern. Amazon Web Services (AWS). CA. 2026 Summer.
    Working on LLM coding agent guardrails.
  • Research Scientist Intern. IBM Research. NY. 2025 Summer.
    Working on LLM coding agents for issue resolution.

Selected Publications (Full List)

Unlocking Model Potentials Through Adaptive Multi-Agent Scaffolding for Efficient Issue Resolution.
Under review, 2026.
Yang Chen, Changshu Liu, Aliya Ahmad, Yiheng Zhou, Reyhaneh Jabbarvand.

SENTINEL: Learning Agent Workflow Guardrails from Offline Trajectories.
Under review, 2026.
Yang Chen, Jinyang Li, Malinda Dilhara, Vidyashankar Sivakumar, Mukul Prasad.

Narrowing the Complexity Gap in the Evaluation of Large Language Models.
Under review, 2026.
Yang Chen, Shuyang Liu, Reyhaneh Jabbarvand.

Evaluating Code Reasoning Abilities of Large Language Models Under Real-World Settings.
Under review, 2025.
Changshu Liu, Alireza Ghazanfari, Yang Chen, Reyhaneh Jabbarvand.

Can Old Tests do New Tricks for Resolving SWE Issues?
The ACM International Conference on the Foundations of Software Engineering.
FSE 2026. Montreal, Canada. July 2026.
Yang Chen, Toufique Ahmed, Reyhaneh Jabbarvand, Martin Hirzel.

Process-Centric Analysis of Agentic Software Systems.
OOPSLA 2026. Oakland, California, United States. October 2026.
Shuyang Liu, Yang Chen, Rahul Krishna, Saurabh Sinha, Jatin Ganhotra, Reyhan Jabbarvand.

Assessing Coherency and Consistency of Code Execution Reasoning by Large Language Models.
International Conference on Software Engineering.
ICSE 2026. Brazil. April 2026.
Changshu Liu, Yang Chen, Reyhan Jabbarvand.

CodeMind: Evaluating Large Language Models for Code Reasoning.
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering.
TSE 2026.
Changshu Liu, Yang Chen, Reyhaneh Jabbarvand.

Neurosymbolic Repair of Test Flakiness.
The 33rd ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis.
ISSTA 2024. Vienna, Austria. September 2024.
139 patches accepted in real-world projects
Yang Chen, Reyhaneh Jabbarvand.

Flakiness Repair in the Era of Large Language Models.
ACM Student Research Competition at 46th International Conference on Software Engineering.
ICSE-Companion 2024. Lisbon, Portugal. April 2024.
🏅 Rank 2nd in ACM Student Research Competition
Yang Chen.

Transforming Test Suites into Croissants.
The 32nd ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis.
ISSTA 2023, Seattle, WA, USA, July 2023.
Yang Chen, Alperen Yildiz, Darko Marinov, and Reyhaneh Jabbarvand.

Automated Bug Generation in the era of Large Language Models.
The 25th IEEE International Conference on Source Code Analysis & Manipulation.
SCAM 2025, Auckland, New Zealand.
Ali Reza Ibrahimzada, Yang Chen, Ryan Rong, and Reyhaneh Jabbarvand.

iPFlakies: A Framework for Detecting and Fixing Python Order-Dependent Flaky Tests.
Proceedings of the 44th International Conference on Software Engineering.
ICSE 2022 Demo Track, Pittsburgh, PA, USA, May 2022.
Ruixin Wang, Yang Chen, and Wing Lam.

Selected Grants

Service