Zhihao Gong

dblp:253/5485 · DBLP profile ↗
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7ranked-venue papers
2as first author
6since 2021 · last 2026
—ORCID · conflict

Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several

Software engineering, systems software and programming languages · 4 · 4 since 2021Artificial intelligence and machine learning · 3 · 2 first-author · 2 since 2021Systems, architecture and hardware · 1Graphics, computer vision, multimedia, augmented reality and games · 1 · 1 first-author · 1 since 2021
YearPublicationVenuePosition
2026 TRACE: Evaluating Execution Efficiency of LLM-Based Code Translation
abstract
While Large Language Models (LLMs) have substantially improved the functional correctness of code translation, the critical dimension of execution efficiency remains overlooked.We present TRACE, the first benchmark to explicitly assess efficiency in LLM-translated code.TRACE includes 1,000 efficiency-critical tasks across C++, Java, and Python, each augmented with stress tests that reveal efficiency disparities often overlooked by small-scale tests.Using TRACE, we conduct an extensive evaluation of 28 representative LLMs and highlight several key insights: 1) Correctness and efficiency are often misaligned: the correctness leader Claude-Sonnet-4-Think achieves only moderate time efficiency, outperformed by smaller open-source LLMs such as Qwen2.5-Coder-14B-Instruct.2) Inefficiency is both prevalent and patterned: 23.5% of correct translations suffer from notable inefficiency, mainly arising from algorithm implementation discrepancy (11.9%), language construct mismatch (66.4%), and resource management inefficiency (21.7%).3) Inference-time prompt strategies bring only modest improvements, indicating that simple prompting alone is insufficient to improve translation efficiency.Together, our results establish execution efficiency as an essential dimension of code translation and position TRACE as a principled foundation for efficiency-oriented evaluation.Our
Zhihao Gong, Zeyu Sun 0004, Dong Huang 0005, Qingyuan Liang, Jie Zhang 0050, Dan Hao 0001
ACL (1)1
2026 Bipartite-Grammar-Aware Pretraining for XML-SQL Code Updating
abstract
The e X tensible M arkup L anguage (XML) is a file format widely used for data transmission in modern software development. In recent years, embedding SQL statements in XML files (i.e., XML-SQL) has become a popular way for developing applications with database access capability. Typically, XML-SQL code snippets demonstrate similar functionalities and structures, leading to repetitive programming work. Therefore, leveraging pre-trained code models for automated code generation presents a promising way to alleviate duplicated efforts and enhance the efficiency of developing XML-SQL code. However, XML-SQL code has strong domain-specific characteristics that general pre-trained code models typically struggle to fully harness, thereby leading to limited overall performance of general pre-trained code models. In this article, we aim to address the challenge of handling this domain-specific knowledge. First, we propose a code updating task and construct the corresponding TwinXSQL dataset to better evaluate the model’s code generation performance in the XML-SQL domain. Then, we leverage the common characteristics of XML-SQL and other programming languages (i.e., all programming languages impose grammar constraints on behavior) to design a bipartite-grammar–aware training framework (named BGA) for unsupervised pre-training, thereby improving the transfer of general-purpose code models to the XML-SQL domain. Specifically, we divide the XML-SQL code into two types of grammatical components: structure components and value components. During pre-training, we undertake three tasks, each designed to learn the internal information of these grammatical components and the relationships between them, enabling the pre-training process to better incorporate previously unlearned domain-specific knowledge of XML-SQL code. Our experimental results show that our trained model XSQLT5-base (220M) improves accuracy by 13.8% compared to the similarly sized CodeT5-base (220M). Additionally, our experiments reveal that ChatGPT, due to its inability to fully learn the XML-SQL domain knowledge, achieves a much lower generation accuracy even with few-shot samples compared to our XSQLT5-base (220M) model.
Qingyuan Liang, Zeyu Sun 0004, Zhihao Gong, Guoqing Wang 0004, Lu Zhang 0023, Guangtai Liang, Qianxiang Wang
ACM Trans. Softw. Eng. Methodol.4
2025 Base-Detail Feature Learning Framework for Visible-Infrared Person Re-Identification
abstract
Visible-infrared person re-identification (VIReID) provides a solution for ReID tasks in 24-hour scenarios; however, significant challenges persist in achieving satisfactory performance due to the substantial discrepancies between visible (VIS) and infrared (IR) modalities. Existing methods inadequately leverage information from different modalities, primarily focusing on digging distinguishing features from modality-shared information while neglecting modality-specific details. To fully utilize differentiated minutiae, we propose a Base-Detail Feature Learning Framework (BDLF) that enhances the learning of both base and detail knowledge, thereby capitalizing on both modality-shared and modality-specific information. Specifically, the proposed BDLF mines detail and base features through a lossless detail feature extraction module and a complementary base embedding generation mechanism, respectively, supported by a novel correlation restriction method that ensures the features gained by BDLF enrich both detail and base knowledge across VIS and IR features. Comprehensive experiments conducted on the SYSU-MM01, RegDB, and LLCM datasets validate the effectiveness of BDLF.
Zhihao Gong, Lian Wu
IJCAI1
2024 Improving Smart Contract Security with Contrastive Learning-based Vulnerability Detection
abstract
Currently, smart contract vulnerabilities (SCVs) have emerged as a major factor threatening the transaction security of blockchain. Existing state-of-the-art methods rely on deep learning to mitigate this threat. They treat each input contract as an independent entity and feed it into a deep learning model to learn vulnerability patterns by fitting vulnerability labels. It is a pity that they disregard the correlation between contracts, failing to consider the commonalities between contracts of the same type and the differences among contracts of different types. As a result, the performance of these methods falls short of the desired level.
Zeyu Sun 0004, Zhihao Gong, Dan Hao 0001
ICSE3
2024 Mutual Learning-Based Framework for Enhancing Robustness of Code Models via Adversarial Training
abstract
Deep code models (DCMs) have achieved impressive accomplishments and have been widely applied to various code-related tasks. However, existing studies show that some DCMs have poor robustness, and even small noise in the input data can lead to erroneous outputs. This phenomenon can seriously hinder the application of these DCMs in real-world scenarios. To address this limitation, we propose MARVEL, a mutual learning-based framework for enhancing the robustness of DCMs via adversarial training. Specifically, MARVEL initializes two identical DCMs, one of which receives Gaussian-distorted data and performs adversarial training, and the other receives the clean data. Then these two DCMs work together to not only fit the true labels but also fit each other's internal parameters. Our intuition is that the DCM can enhance robustness by training noisy data, while the DCM achieves accurate prediction performance by learn the clean data. Their mutual learning enables the DCM to balance both robustness and predictive performance.
Yangsen Wang, Zhihao Gong, Junjie Chen 0003, Dan Hao 0001
ASE4
2024 Try with Simpler - An Evaluation of Improved Principal Component Analysis in Log-based Anomaly Detection
abstract
With the rapid development of deep learning (DL), the recent trend of log-based anomaly detection focuses on extracting semantic information from log events (i.e., templates of log messages) and designing more advanced DL models for anomaly detection. Indeed, the effectiveness of log-based anomaly detection can be improved, but these DL-based techniques further suffer from the limitations of more heavy dependency on training data (such as data quality or data labels) and higher costs in time and resources due to the complexity and scale of DL models, which hinder their practical use. On the contrary, the techniques based on traditional machine learning or data mining algorithms are less dependent on training data and more efficient but produce worse effectiveness than DL-based techniques, which is mainly caused by the problem of unseen log events (some log events in incoming log messages are unseen in training data) confirmed by our motivating study. Intuitively, if we can improve the effectiveness of traditional techniques to be comparable with advanced DL-based techniques, then log-based anomaly detection can be more practical. Indeed, an existing study in the other area (i.e., linking questions posted on Stack Overflow) has pointed out that traditional techniques with some optimizations can indeed achieve comparable effectiveness with the state-of-the-art DL-based technique, indicating the feasibility of enhancing traditional log-based anomaly detection techniques to some degree. Inspired by the idea of “try-with-simpler,” we conducted the first empirical study to explore the potential of improving traditional techniques for more practical log-based anomaly detection. In this work, we optimized the traditional unsupervised PCA (Principal Component Analysis) technique by incorporating a lightweight semantic-based log representation in it, called SemPCA , and conducted an extensive study to investigate the potential of SemPCA for more practical log-based anomaly detection. By comparing seven log-based anomaly detection techniques (including four DL-based techniques, two traditional techniques, and SemPCA ) on both public and industrial datasets, our results show that SemPCA achieves comparable effectiveness as advanced supervised/semi-supervised DL-based techniques while being much more stable under insufficient training data and more efficient, demonstrating that the traditional technique can still excel after small but useful adaptation.
Lin Yang 0030, Junjie Chen 0003, Shutao Gao, Zhihao Gong, Hongyu Zhang 0002, Huaan Li
ACM Trans. Softw. Eng. Methodol.4
2020 Imitative Reinforcement Learning Fusing Vision and Pure Pursuit for Self-driving
abstract
Autonomous urban driving navigation is still an open problem and has ample room for improvement in unknown complex environments and terrible weather conditions. In this paper, we propose a two-stage framework, called IPP-RL, to handle these problems. IPP means an Imitation learning method fusing visual information with the additional steering angle calculated by Pure-Pursuit (PP) method, and RL means using Reinforcement Learning for further training. In our IPP model, the visual information captured by camera can be compensated by the calculated steering angle, thus it could perform well under bad weather conditions. However, imitation learning performance is limited by the driving data severely. Thus we use a reinforcement learning method-Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (DDPG)-in the second stage training, which shares the learned weights from pretrained IPP model. In this way, our IPP-RL can lower the dependency of imitation learning on demonstration data and solve the problem of low exploration efficiency caused by randomly initialized weights in reinforcement learning. Moreover, we design a more reasonable reward function and use the n-step return to update the critic-network in DDPG. Our experiments on CARLA driving benchmark demonstrate that our IPP-RL is robust to lousy weather conditions and shows remarkable generalization capability in unknown environments on navigation task.
Mingxing Peng, Zhihao Gong, Chen Sun 0008, Long Chen 0005, Dongpu Cao
ICRA2