EDBT 2026 Demo / reviewers in the wild / expert
Xiangxin Meng
dblp:169/4649
· DBLP profile ↗
10ranked-venue papers
3as first author
10since 2021 · last 2025
0000-0001-5630-4810ORCID · corroborated
Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several
Software engineering, systems software and programming languages · 6 · 3 first-author · 6 since 2021Artificial intelligence and machine learning · 1 · 1 since 2021Computer networks · 1 · 1 since 2021Databases, data management, data science and information retrieval · 1 · 1 since 2021Applied, interdisciplinary, general and emerging computing · 1 · 1 since 2021
| Year | Publication | Venue | Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2025 | SoRFT: Issue Resolving with Subtask-oriented Reinforced Fine-TuningabstractMainstream issue-resolving frameworks predominantly rely on commercial models, leading to high costs and privacy concerns.Existing training approaches for issue resolving struggle with poor generalization and fail to fully leverage open-source development resources.We propose Subtask-oriented Reinforced Fine-Tuning (SoRFT), a novel training approach to enhance the issue resolving capability of LLMs.We decomposes issue resolving into structured subtasks: file localization, function localization, line localization, and code edit generation.SoRFT consists of two training stages:(1) rejection-sampled supervised fine-tuning, Chain of Thought (CoT) data is filtered using ground-truth before fine-tuning the LLM, and (2) rule-based reinforcement learning, which leverages PPO with ground-truth based rewards.We evaluate the SoRFT-trained model on SWE-Bench Verified and SWE-Bench Lite, achieving state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance among open-source models (e.g., resolve 21.4% issues on SWE-Bench Verified with SoRFT-Qwen-7B).The experimental results demonstrate that SoRFT significantly enhances issue-resolving performance, improves model generalization, and provides a cost-efficient alternative to commercial models. Zexiong Ma, Chao Peng 0002, Xiangxin Meng, Yanzhen Zou |
ACL (1) | 4 |
| 2025 | Template-Guided Program Repair in the Era of Large Language ModelsabstractRecent advancements in automated program repair (APR) have been significantly driven by the application of Large Language Models (LLMs). In particular, the integration of LLMs with traditional template-based repair methods has demonstrated effective outcomes. Despite this, the synergy between the strengths of traditional methods and LLMs remains underexploited. This oversight originates from the indiscriminate use of templates and their insufficient coverage. Also, using small-scale LLMs within the zero-shot learning context proves to be suboptimal. To alleviate the limitations, we propose NTR (Neural Template Repair), a two-stage repair framework including template selection and patch generation, both of which are under the fine-tuning paradigm. In the template selection phase, we formulate it as a multiclass classification problem and fine-tune million-level LLMs for better selecting possible templates. During the patch generation phase, we leverage the chosen templates as probable directions (e.g., ‘Mutate Conditional Expression’) to guide the fine-tuning process of LLMs at the billion-level scale for precise patch creation. Moreover, we incorporate a unique template to signify the absence of a suitable template and employ a probability-based prioritization of templates, thereby optimizing patch generation. This framework not only effectively addresses template mismatch issues, but also enables the billion-level LLMs to explore the patch space more efficiently, despite the GPU memory constraints. We evaluate NTR with different foundational models on Defects4J V1.2 and HumanEval-Java, the framework consistently demonstrates significant effectiveness. When utilizing StarCoder as the foundational model for patch generation, NTR fixes 128 and 129 bugs in Defects4J and HumanEval, outperforming the best baseline APR tool by 14 and 59 bugs. With the larger CodeLlama model, the fixed bugs rise to 139 and 136, respectively, exceeding the baseline by 25 and 66 bugs. Notably, the performance stems not only from the foundational models but also benefits greatly from our NTR framework. Specifically, NTR's implementation with StarCoder and CodeLlama leads to 22 and 23 additional fixes, which is beyond what the models achieve on their own. This emphasizes the success of our new perspective on utilizing templates to unlock the bug-fixing potential of LLMs. Jian Zhang 0087, Xiangxin Meng, Yang Liu 0003 |
ICSE | 3 |
| 2025 | Understanding Large Language Model Performance in Software Engineering: A Large-scale Question Answering BenchmarkabstractIn this work, we introduce CodeRepoQA, a large-scale benchmark specifically designed for evaluating repository-level question-answering capabilities in the field of software engineering. CodeRepoQA encompasses five programming languages and covers a wide range of scenarios, enabling comprehensive evaluation of language models.To construct this dataset, we crawl data from 30 well-known repositories in GitHub, the largest platform for hosting and collaborating on code, and carefully filter the raw data.In total, CodeRepoQA is a multi-turn question-answering benchmark with 585,687 entries. It covers a diverse array of software engineering scenarios, with an average of 6.62 dialogue turns per entry. Ruida Hu, Chao Peng 0002, Jingyi Ren, Xiangxin Meng, Qinyun Wu, Xinchen Wang 0001, Cuiyun Gao 0001 |
SIGIR | 5 |
| 2024 | MTL-TRANSFER: Leveraging Multi-task Learning and Transferred Knowledge for Improving Fault Localization and Program RepairabstractFault localization (FL) and automated program repair (APR) are two main tasks of automatic software debugging. Compared with traditional methods, deep learning-based approaches have been demonstrated to achieve better performance in FL and APR tasks. However, the existing deep learning-based FL methods ignore the deep semantic features or only consider simple code representations. And for APR tasks, existing template-based APR methods are weak in selecting the correct fix templates for more effective program repair, which are also not able to synthesize patches via the embedded end-to-end code modification knowledge obtained by training models on large-scale bug-fix code pairs. Moreover, in most of FL and APR methods, the model designs and training phases are performed separately, leading to ineffective sharing of updated parameters and extracted knowledge during the training process. This limitation hinders the further improvement in the performance of FL and APR tasks. To solve the above problems, we propose a novel approach called MTL-TRANSFER, which leverages a multi-task learning strategy to extract deep semantic features and transferred knowledge from different perspectives. First, we construct a large-scale open-source bug datasets and implement 11 multi-task learning models for bug detection and patch generation sub-tasks on 11 commonly used bug types, as well as one multi-classifier to learn the relevant semantics for the subsequent fix template selection task. Second, an MLP-based ranking model is leveraged to fuse spectrum-based, mutation-based and semantic-based features to generate a sorted list of suspicious statements. Third, we combine the patches generated by the neural patch generation sub-task from the multi-task learning strategy with the optimized fix template selecting order gained from the multi-classifier mentioned above. Finally, the more accurate FL results, the optimized fix template selecting order, and the expanded patch candidates are combined together to further enhance the overall performance of APR tasks. Our extensive experiments on widely-used benchmark Defects4J show that MTL-TRANSFER outperforms all baselines in FL and APR tasks, proving the effectiveness of our approach. Compared with our previously proposed FL method TRANSFER-FL (which is also the state-of-the-art statement-level FL method), MTL-TRANSFER increases the faults hit by 8/11/12 on Top-1/3/5 metrics (92/159/183 in total). And on APR tasks, the number of successfully repaired bugs of MTL-TRANSFER under the perfect localization setting reaches 75, which is 8 more than our previous APR method TRANSFER-PR. Furthermore, another experiment to simulate the actual repair scenarios shows that MTL-TRANSFER can successfully repair 15 and 9 more bugs (56 in total) compared with TBar and TRANSFER, which demonstrates the effectiveness of the combination of our optimized FL and APR components. Xu Wang 0007, Xiangxin Meng, Hongliang Cao, Hongyu Zhang 0002, Hailong Sun 0001, Xudong Liu 0001, Chunming Hu |
ACM Trans. Softw. Eng. Methodol. | 3 |
| 2023 | Improving Vulnerability Detection with Hybrid Code Graph RepresentationabstractThe increasing richness of software applications contributes to the enhanced productivity and convenience in daily life. However, the growing software complexity simultaneously poses significant challenges to software security. As one of the most important solutions, vulnerability detection technology attracts increasing attention. This paper proposes a novel vulnerability detection method HybridNN based on graph neural networks (GNNs). To begin, we simplify the code property graph (CPG) to design a hybrid code graph (HCG) which is better suitable for the deep semantic extraction via GNN models. Subsequently, the datasets consisting of considerable amount of samples including both artificially synthesized and real-world vulnerabilities are constructed. Next, we leverage a GNN model with a hierarchical attention mechanism which is proficient in extracting deep semantics in heterogeneous graphs, and apply it to the newly designed HCG representation. Moreover, we propose UD-Sampling method, which combines up-sampling and down-sampling methods, to balance the distribution of the training samples. Finally, extensive experiments are conducted, showing that HybridNN outperforms all baseline methods. Xiangxin Meng, Shaoxiao Lu, Xu Wang 0007, Xudong Liu 0001, Chunming Hu |
APSEC | 1 |
| 2023 | Template-based Neural Program RepairabstractIn recent years, template-based and NMT-based automated program repair methods have been widely studied and achieved promising results. However, there are still disadvantages in both methods. The template-based methods cannot fix the bugs whose types are beyond the capabilities of the templates and only use the syntax information to guide the patch synthesis, while the NMT-based methods intend to generate the small range of fixed code for better performance and may suffer from the OOV (Out-of-vocabulary) problem. To solve these problems, we propose a novel template-based neural program repair approach called TENURE to combine the template-based and NMT- based methods. First, we build two large-scale datasets for 35 fix templates from template-based method and one special fix template (single-line code generation) from NMT-based method, respectively. Second, the encoder-decoder models are adopted to learn deep semantic features for generating patch intermediate representations (IRs) for different templates. The optimized copy mechanism is also used to alleviate the OOV problem. Third, based on the combined patch IRs for different templates, three tools are developed to recover real patches from the patch IRs, replace the unknown tokens, and filter the patch candidates with compilation errors by leveraging the project-specific information. On Defects4J-vl.2, TENURE can fix 79 bugs and 52 bugs with perfect and Ochiai fault localization, respectively. It is able to repair 50 and 32 bugs as well on Defects4J-v2.0. Compared with the existing template-based and NMT-based studies, TENURE achieves the best performance in all experiments. Xiangxin Meng, Xu Wang 0007, Hongyu Zhang 0002, Hailong Sun 0001, Xudong Liu 0001, Chunming Hu |
ICSE | 1 |
| 2023 | An Empirical Study on Fine-Tuning Large Language Models of Code for Automated Program RepairabstractThe advent of large language models (LLMs) has opened up new opportunities for automated program repair (APR). In particular, some recent studies have explored how to leverage large language models of code (LLMCs) for program repair tasks and show promising results. However, most of them adopt the zero/few-shot learning paradigm for APR, which directly use LLMCs to generate the possibly correct code given its surrounding context. Though effective, the repair capabilities of LLMCs based on the fine-tuning paradigm have yet to be extensively explored. Also, it remains unknown whether LLMCs have the potential to repair more complicated bugs (e.g., multi-hunk bugs). To fill the gap, in this work, we conduct a comprehensive study on the program repair capability of LLMCs in the fine-tuning paradigm. We select 5 popular LLMCs with representative pre-training architectures, including CodeBERT, GraphCode-BERT, PLBART, CodeT5, and UniX coder. We consider 3 typical program repair scenarios (i.e., bugs, vulnerabilities, and errors) involving 3 programming languages (i.e., Java,$\mathrm{C}/\mathrm{C}++$, and JavaScript). Notably, we take both single-hunk and multi-hunk bugs/vulnerabilities into account. We then fine-tune them on widely-used datasets and compare them with existing state-of-the-art APR tools. We also investigate the impact of different design choices, which include code abstractions, code representations, and model evaluation metrics. Our experimental results show that LLMCs in the fine-tuning paradigm can significantly outperform previous state-of-the-art APR tools. Through in-depth analysis, we provide insights into choosing appropriate strategies to guide LLMCs for better performance. Lastly, we reveal several limitations of LLMCs for APR and make suggestions for future research on LLMC-based APR. Xiangxin Meng, Jian Zhang 0087, Yang Liu 0003, Yuqing Zhang 0001 |
ASE | 2 |
| 2022 | Improving Fault Localization and Program Repair with Deep Semantic Features and Transferred KnowledgeabstractAutomatic software debugging mainly includes two tasks of fault localization and automated program repair. Compared with the traditional spectrum-based and mutation-based methods, deep learning-based methods are proposed to achieve better performance for fault localization. However, the existing methods ignore the deep semantic features or only consider simple code representations. They do not leverage the existing bug-related knowledge from large-scale open-source projects either. In addition, existing template-based program repair techniques can incorporate project specific information better than deep-learning approaches. However, they are weak in selecting the fix templates for efficient program repair. In this work, we propose a novel approach called TRANSFER, which leverages the deep semantic features and transferred knowledge from open-source data to improve fault localization and program repair. First, we build two large-scale open-source bug datasets and design 11 BiLSTM-based binary classifiers and a BiLSTM-based multi-classifier to learn deep semantic features of statements for fault localization and program repair, respectively. Second, we combine semantic-based, spectrum-based and mutation-based features and use an MLP-based model for fault localization. Third, the semantic-based features are leveraged to rank the fix templates for program repair. Our extensive experiments on widely-used benchmark De-fects4J show that TRANSFER outperforms all baselines in fault localization, and is better than existing deep-learning methods in automated program repair. Compared with the typical template-based work TBar, TRANSFER can correctly repair 6 more bugs (47 in total) on Defects4J. Xiangxin Meng, Xu Wang 0007, Hongyu Zhang 0002, Hailong Sun 0001, Xudong Liu 0001 |
ICSE | 1 |
| 2022 | DreamLoc: A Deep Relevance Matching-Based Framework for bug LocalizationabstractTo improve the software debugging efficiency, bug localization techniques have been developed to automatically locate buggy files based on bug reports. Traditional information retrieval-based bug localization cannot deal with the lexical mismatch, thus its performance is limited. In recent years, some deep learning models have been proposed to learn the semantics of bug reports and source files to bridge the lexical gap. However, their accuracy is still limited as building accurate semantic representations of bug reports and source files is very challenging. Recently, relevance matching was proposed to identify whether a document is relevant to a given query by considering both local matching and global matching. In this work, we propose a novel framework DreamLoc, which utilizes a relevance matching model to locate buggy files. Specifically, DreamLoc conducts the local matching by employing an attention-based mechanism to calculate the matching scores between bug report terms and code snippets. It also conducts the global matching by employing a gating mechanism to aggregate results of local matching and obtain the final matching score between a bug report and a source file. Since the local matching considers the relevance between each word and the global matching differentiates the importance of words, DreamLoc can effectively model the characteristics of bug reports and source files. Experimental results on five benchmark datasets show that DreamLoc outperforms five state-of-the-art models. For example, compared with DeepLoc, a recently proposed approach, the evaluation measures Accuracy@10, MAP, and MRR are improved by 6.4%, 7.4%, and 7.2%, respectively. Binhang Qi, Hailong Sun 0001, Wei Yuan 0011, Hongyu Zhang 0002, Xiangxin Meng |
IEEE Trans. Reliab. | 5 |
| 2021 | Dispersed Computing for Tactical Edge in Future Wars: Vision, Architecture, and ChallengesabstractIn the future, the tactical edge is far away from the command center, the resources of communication and computing are limited, and the battlefield situation is changing rapidly, which leads to the weak connection and fast changes of network topology in a harsh and complex battlefield environment. Thus, to meet the needs of communication and computing to build a new generation of computing architecture for real‐time sharing and service collaboration of tactical edge resources to win the future war, the dispersed computing (DCOMP) seeks a new solution to satisfy the requirements of fast and efficient sensing, transmission, integrating, scheduling, and processing of various information in the tactical edge. Through the research of a traditional computing paradigm of mobile cloud computing (MCC), fog computing (FC), mobile edge computing (MEC), mobile ad hoc network (MANET), etc., it can be found that these computations have difficulty in meeting the high changing and complex battlefield environment and we propose a novel architecture of DCOMP to build a scalable, extensible, and robust decision‐making system, to realize powerful and secure communication, computing, storage, and information processing capabilities for the tactical edge. We illustrate the fundamental principles of building a network model, channel allocation, and forwarding control mechanism of the network architecture for DCOMP called DANET and then design a new architecture, programming model, task awareness, and computing scheduling for DCOMP. Finally, we discuss the main requirements and challenges of DCOMP in future wars. Haigen Yang, GuiYing Sun, Xiangxin Meng, HongYan Yu, Wenting Xu, Xiaokun Ying |
Wirel. Commun. Mob. Comput. | 5 |