I received my Ph.D degree at the The Chinese University of Hong Kong, under the supervision of Prof. Michael R. Lyu. Previously, I received Bachelor’s degree in Information Security from Huazhong University of Science and Technology in 2021.

I am dedicated to building next-generation AI Coding Agents by mastering the full spectrum of techs involved. My goal is to bridge the gap between SE tools and models.

My expertise is built on three core pillars:

• Coding Agent Tools & Skills: Developing agents grounded in Program Analysis, treating static and dynamic analysis as equipable skills that allow agents to be precise and verifiable.
• Repository-Level Context Engineering: Optimizing code context and architecture to enable agents to understand and modify large-scale, complex codebases.
• Open Code World Model: Pioneering execution-aware problem solving. Combining SFT/RL with dynamic program analysis, aiming to evolve LLMs from static text generators into agents that understand execution states.

Feel free to drop me an email if you are interested in my research or just want to talk with me 😆.

🔥 News

• [09/2025] 🎉 Our LogImprover, ErrorPrism, LogPilot have been accepted by ASE25.
• [07/2025] 🎉 Passed my thesis defense!
• [05/2025] 🎉 Our COFFE has won the ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award
• [01/2025] 🎉 Our COCA has been accepted by ICSE25.
• [05/2024] I will join the Microsoft Azure Systems Research group as a research intern this summer. Meet me @Redmond!
• [04/2024] Check the first & most large-scale empirical study LogBench about “LLMs for logging” [Paper] [LogBench]!
• [01/2024] 🎉 Our SCLogger and LILAC have been accepted without revision by FSE24 (56/483).
• [01/2024] 🎉 Our IDECoder has been accepted by ICSE-LLM4Code.
• [08/2023] 🎉 Our AutoLog has been accepted by ASE23 (134/629).

📝 Selected Publications

• TOSEM Renyi Zhong, Yichen Li, Guangba Yu, Wenwei Gu, Jinxi Kuang, Yintong Huo, Michael R. Lyu. “Larger is Not Always Better: Exploring Small Open-Source Language Models in Logging Statement Generation”. ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (Journal-First).
• ASE'25 Yichen Li, Jinyang Liu, Junsong Pu, Zhihan Jiang, Zhuangbin Chen, Xiao He, Tieying Zhang, Jianjun Chen, Yi Li, Rui Shi, Michael R. Lyu. “Automated Proactive Logging Quality Improvement for Large-Scale Codebases”. The IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering, Seoul, South Korea, Nov 2025.
• ASE'25 Junsong Pu, Yichen Li, Zhuangbin Chen, Jinyang Liu, Zhihan Jiang, Jianjun Chen, Rui Shi, Zibin Zheng, Tieying Zhang. “ErrorPrism: Reconstructing Error Propagation Paths in Cloud Service Systems”. The IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering, Seoul, South Korea, Nov 2025.
• ASE'25 Zhihan Jiang, Jinyang Liu, Yichen Li, Haiyu Huang, Xiao He, Tieying Zhang, Jianjun Chen, Yi Li, Rui Shi, Michael R. Lyu. “LogPilot: Intent-aware and Scalable Alert Diagnosis for Large-scale Online Service Systems”. The IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering, Seoul, South Korea, Nov 2025.
• ASE-NIER'25 Ruofan Lu, Yichen Li, Yintong Huo. “Exploring Autonomous Agents: A Closer Look at Why They Fail When Completing Tasks” The IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering, Seoul, South Korea, Nov 2025.
• PACMI'25 Vaastav Anand, Yichen Li, Alok Gautam Kumbhare, Celine Irvene, Chetan Bansal, Gagan Somashekar, Jonathan Mace, Pedro Las-Casas, and Rodrigo Fonseca. “Intent-based System Design and Operation”. Practical Adoption Challenges of ML for Systems (co-located with SOSP), 2025.
• DSN‘25 Zhihan Jiang, Rui Ren, Guangba Yu, Yulun Wu, Wenwei Gu, Yichen Li, Yujie Huang, Cong Feng, Zengyin Yang, Yongqiang Yang, Michael R. Lyu. “LLMPrism: Black-box Performance Diagnosis for Production LLM Training Platforms” the 55th Annual IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks, Naples, Italy, Jun 2025.
• TOSEM Renyi Zhong, Yichen Li, Jinxi Kuang, Wenwei Gu, Yintong Huo, Michael R. Lyu. “Automated Detection and Repair of Specific Defects in Logging Statements”. ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (Journal-First).
• ICSE'25 Yichen Li, Yulun Wu, Jinyang Liu, Zhihan Jiang, Zhuangbin Chen, Guangba Yu and Michael R. Lyu. “COCA: Generative Root Cause Analysis for Distributed Systems with Code Knowledge”. The IEEE/ACM International Conference on Software Engineering, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, Apr 2025.
• FSE'25 Yun Peng, Jun Wan, Yichen Li and Xiaoxue Ren. “COFFE: A Code Efficiency Benchmark for Code Generation”. The ACM International Conference on the Foundations of Software Engineering, Trondheim, Norway, June 2025. 🏆ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award
• FSE'25 Zhihan Jiang, Junjie Huang, Guangba Yu, Zhuangbin Chen, Yichen Li, Renyi Zhong, Cong Feng, Yongqiang Yang, Zengyin Yang, Michael R. Lyu. “L4: Diagnosing Large-scale LLM Training Failures via Automated Log Analysis”. The ACM International Conference on the Foundations of Software Engineering, Trondheim, Norway, June 2025.
• FSE'25 Weibin Wu, Haoxuan Hu, Zhaoji Fan, Yitong Qiao, Yizhan Huang, Yichen Li and Michael R. Lyu. “An Empirical Study of Code Clones from Commercial AI Code Generators”. The ACM International Conference on the Foundations of Software Engineering, Trondheim, Norway, June 2025.
• FSE'24 Yichen Li, Yintong Huo, Renyi Zhong, Zhihan Jiang, Jinyang Liu, Junjie Huang, Jiazhen Gu, Pinjia He and Michael R. Lyu. “Go Static: Contextualized Logging Statement Generation”. The ACM International Conference on the Foundations of Software Engineering, Porto de Galinhas, Brazil, July 2024. [Project]
• FSE’24 Yizhan Huang, Yichen Li, Weibin Wu, Jianping Zhang and Michael R. Lyu. “Your Code Secret Belongs to Me: Neural Code Completion Tools Can Memorize Hard-coded Credentials”. The ACM International Conference on the Foundations of Software Engineering, Porto de Galinhas, Brazil, July 2024. [Project][News🔥][News🔥]
• FSE’24 Zhihan Jiang, Jinyang Liu, Zhuangbin Chen, Yichen Li, Junjie Huang, Yintong Huo, Pinjia He, Jiazhen Gu and Michael R. Lyu. “LILAC: Log Parsing using LLMs with Adaptive Parsing Cache”. The ACM International Conference on the Foundations of Software Engineering, Porto de Galinhas, Brazil, July 2024. [Project]
• TSE Yichen Li*, Yintong Huo*, Zhihan Jiang, Renyi Zhong, Pinjia He, Yuxin Su, Lionel C. Briand and Michael R. Lyu. “Exploring the Effectiveness of LLMs in Automated Logging Statement Generation: An Empirical Study”. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering (Journal-First). [Project]
• ICSE-LLM4Code'24 Yichen Li, Yun Peng, Yintong Huo and Michael R. Lyu. “Enhancing LLM-based Coding Tools Through Native Integration of IDE-Derived Static Context”. The IEEE/ACM International Conference on Software Engineering Workshop on Large Language Model for Code, Lisbon, Portugal, Apr 2024.
• ISSTA'24 Zhihan Jiang, Jinyang Liu, Junjie Huang, Yichen Li, Yintong Huo, Jiazhen Gu, Zhuangbin Chen, Jieming Zhu and Michael R. Lyu. “A Large-scale Evaluation for Log Parsing Techniques: How Far are We?”. The ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis, Vienna, Austria, Sep 2024. [Project]
• ISSTA'24 Shiwen Shan, Yintong Huo, Yuxin Su, Yichen Li, Dan Li, Zibin Zheng. “Face It Yourselves: An LLM-based Two-Stage Strategy to Localize Configuration Errors via Logs”. The ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis, Vienna, Austria, Sep 2024. [Project]
• ICSE-SEIP'24 Junjie Huang, Jinyang Liu, Zhuangbin Chen, Zhihan Jiang, Yichen Li, Jiazhen Gu, Cong Feng, Zengyin Yang, Yongqiang Yang, and Michael R. Lyu. “FaultProfIT: Hierarchical Fault Profiling of Incident Tickets in Large-scale Cloud Systems”. The IEEE/ACM International Conference on Software Engineering, Lisbon, Portugal, Apr 2024.
• TSE Xin-Cheng Wen, Cuiyun Gao, Jiaxin Ye, Yichen Li, Zhihong Tian, Yan Jia, Xuan Wang. “Meta-path based attentional graph learning model for vulnerability detection”. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering (Journal-First).
• ASE'23 Yintong Huo*, Yichen Li*, Yuxin Su, Pinjia He, Zifan Xie and Michael R. Lyu. “AutoLog: A Log Sequence Synthesis Framework for Anomaly Detection”. The IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering, Kirchberg, Luxembourg, Sep 2023. (*Equal contribution) [Project]
• OSR Yichen Li, Xu Zhang, Shilin He, Zhuangbin Chen, Yu Kang, Jinyang Liu, Liqun Li, Yingnong Dang, Feng Gao, Zhangwei Xu, Saravan Rajmohan, Qingwei Lin, Dongmei Zhang, Michael R Lyu. “An Intelligent Framework for Timely, Accurate, and Comprehensive Cloud Incident Detection”. ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review.
• TSE Yun Peng, Shuqing Li, Wenwei Gu, Yichen Li, Wenxuan Wang, Cuiyun Gao, Michael R Lyu. “Revisiting, benchmarking and exploring API recommendation: How far are we?”. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering (Journal-First). [Project]

📖 Educations

• 2021.08 ~ 2025.10 Ph.D. student, Chinese University of Hong Kong
• 2017.09 ~ 2021.06 Bachelor degree, Huazhong University of Science and Technology

🎖 Honors and Awards

• ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award. 2025.
• National Scholarship, Ministry of Education of the P.R. China. 2021.
• National Scholarship, Ministry of Education of the P.R. China. 2020.
• Star of Tomorrow, Microsoft Research Asia.

🏃 Experiences

• 2024.11 - Now: Research Intern, ByteBrain@ByteDance. China.
• 2024.06 - 2024.09: Research Intern, Azure System Research@Microsoft Research. US.
• 2022.04 - 2022.07: Research Intern, DKI@Microsoft Research Asia. China.
• 2020.11 - 2021.06: Research Intern, DKI@Microsoft Research Asia. China.

💼 Services

• Program Committee:
  • 2025: ISSRE’25, EUROSYS’26 (Shadow PC), APSEC’25, FORGE’26, MSR’25 (Junior PC)
  • 2024: ISSRE’24 (Fast Abstract Track)
• Review Committee:
  • 2025: TOSEM
• Reviewer:
  • TOSEM, TSE, CSUR, TIFS, IoTJ, TR, EMSE
• Sub-Reviewer:
  • 2025: ATC
  • 2024: FSE, ISSTA, ISSRE
  • 2023: DSN, FSE, ISSRE, ICPE
  • 2022: FSE, ISSRE
  • 2021: DSN, ICSE