Rui Dong

I am a Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science and Engineering department at the University of Michigan and I am advised by Prof. Xinyu Wang.

Previously, I received my bachelor's degree with high honors in Computer Science and Mathematics from the University of Michigan.

Email / LinkedIn / pgp / CV / Google scholar

Research

My research focuses on advancing automation in real-world applications through program synthesis and symbolic reasoning. My primary research directions are: 1) Developing core algorithms and necessary architectural support that ensure scalable, robust program synthesis methods, and 2) Applying these techniques to create practical, user-friendly solutions for real-world scenarios. Recently, I have been exploring how to leverage modern computational power to enable large-scale program synthesis.

Publications
(* equal contributions, Rui Dong is underlined.)

Presynthesis: Towards Scaling Up Program Synthesis with Finer-Grained Abstract Semantics
Rui Dong, Qingyue Wu, Danny Ding, Zheng Guo, Ruyi Ji, Xinyu Wang.
PLDI, 2026.

Efficient Bottom-Up Synthesis for Programs with Local Variables
Xiang Li*, Xiangyu Zhou*, Rui Dong, Yihong Zhang, Xinyu Wang.
POPL, 2024.
[pdf] [artifact]

SlabCity: Whole-Query Optimization using Program Synthesis
Rui Dong*, Jie Liu*, Yuxuan Zhu, Cong Yan, Barzan Mozafari, Xinyu Wang.
VLDB, 2023.
[pdf] [benchmarks] [slides] [talk] [poster]

MIWA: Mixed-Initiative Web Automation for Better User Control and Confidence
Weihao Chen, Xiaoyu Liu, Jiacheng Zhang, Ian Iong Lam, Zhicheng Huang, Rui Dong, Xinyu Wang, Tianyi Zhang.
UIST, 2023.
[pdf] [artifact]

DiLogics: Creating Web Automation Programs with Diverse Logics
Kevin Pu, Jim Yang, Angel Yuan, Minyi Ma, Rui Dong, Xinyu Wang, Yan Chen, Tovi Grossman.
UIST, 2023.
[pdf] [demo]

SemanticOn: Specifying Content-Based Semantic Conditions for Web Automation Programs
Kevin Pu, Rainey Fu, Rui Dong, Xinyu Wang, Yan Chen, Tovi Grossman.
UIST, 2022. Best Paper Honorable Mention
[pdf] [preview] [demo]

WebRobot: Web Robotic Process Automation using Interactive Programming-by-Demonstration
Rui Dong, Zhicheng Huang, Ian Iong Lam, Yan Chen, Xinyu Wang.
PLDI, 2022.
[pdf] [slides] [talk]

Services

Program Committee:

aiDM@SIGMOD 2025, AutoMates@IJCAI 2024, AutoMates@IJCAI 2023

Artifact Evaluation Committee:

OOPSLA 2025, POPL 2025, PLDI 2025, VMCAI 2024, POPL 2024, PLDI 2024, PLDI 2023, VMCAI 2023

Teaching

Winter 2024: EECS 481: Software Engineering (Graduate Student Instructor)
Winter 2023: EECS 481: Software Engineering (Graduate Student Instructor)
Fall 2022: EECS 481: Software Engineering (Graduate Student Instructor)

Personal

My girlfriend and I adopted Quanquan (a lovely black-and-white cat) when he was two months old. Check him out here!