Sam Cheng

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chengsam@google.com / Google Scholar / LinkedIn

I am working on coding agents, code correctness and agent correctness for Google's production. Before that, I did my PhD in computer science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, advised by Darko Marinov. I did my undergraduate in computer science at the University of California, Davis.

Publications

  1. Grounding AI Agents in Contracts: An Empirical Evaluation of Spec-Driven Test Generation
    Michele Tufano, James McClure, José Cambronero, Runxiang Cheng, Sherry Shi, Renyao Wei, Dorothy Chen, Franjo Ivančić, Livio Dalloro, Pat Rondon
    35th ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis
    ISSTA 2026, Specification-Driven Development Life Cycle Workshop
  2. Dynamic Cogeneration of Bug Reproduction Test in Agentic Program Repair
    Runxiang Cheng, Michele Tufano, José Cambronero, Renyao Wei, Sherry Shi, Grant Uy, Pat Rondon, Franjo Ivančić
    34th ACM International Conference on the Foundations of Software Engineering
    FSE 2026, Industry
  3. Abstain and Validate: A Dual-LLM Policy for Reducing Noise in Agentic Program Repair
    José Cambronero, Michele Tufano, Sherry Shi, Renyao Wei, Grant Uy, Runxiang Cheng, Chin-Jung Liu, Shiying Pan, Satish Chandra, Pat Rondon
    48th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Software Engineering
    ICSE 2026, Software Engineering in Practice
  4. Towards a Human-in-the-Loop Framework for Reliable Patch Evaluation Using an LLM-as-a-Judge
    Sherry Shi, Renyao Wei, Michele Tufano, José Cambronero, Runxiang Cheng, Franjo Ivančić, Pat Rondon
    48th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Software Engineering
    ICSE 2026, AI for Software Quality Evaluation Workshop
  5. pytest-ranking: A Regression Test Prioritization Tool for Python
    Runxiang Cheng, Kaiyao Ke, Darko Marinov
    33rd ACM International Conference on the Foundations of Software Engineering
    FSE 2025, Demonstrations
  6. Regression Test Prioritization for Modern Software
    Runxiang Cheng
    Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
    2025
  7. Agentic Bug Reproduction for Effective Automated Program Repair at Google
    Runxiang Cheng, Michele Tufano, Jürgen Cito, José Cambronero, Pat Rondon, Renyao Wei, Aaron Sun, Satish Chandra
    Preprint 2025
  8. Large Language Models as Configuration Validators
    Xinyu Lian*, Yinfang Chen*, Runxiang Cheng, Jie Huang, Parth Thakkar, Minjia Zhang, Tianyin Xu
    47th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Software Engineering
    ICSE 2025
  9. Revisiting Test-Case Prioritization on Long-Running Test Suites
    Runxiang Cheng, Shuai Wang, Reyhaneh Jabbarvand, Darko Marinov
    33rd ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis
    ISSTA 2024
  10. Efficient Modality Selection in Multimodal Learning
    Yifei He*, Runxiang Cheng*, Gargi Balasubramaniam*, Yao-Hung Hubert Tsai, Han Zhao
    Journal of Machine Learning Research, Volume 25
    JMLR 2024
  11. Exploring CXL-based KV Cache Storage for LLM Serving
    Yupeng Tang*, Runxiang Cheng*, Ping Zhou, Tongping Liu, Kyoungryun Bae, Jianjun Chen, Wu Xiang, Fei Liu, Wei Tang, Rui Shi
    38th Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems
    NeurIPS 2024, Machine Learning for Systems Workshop
  12. Towards GPU Memory Efficiency for Distributed Training at Scale
    Runxiang Cheng, Chris Cai, Selman Yilmaz, Rahul Mitra, Malay Bag, Mrinmoy Ghosh, Tianyin Xu
    14th ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing
    SoCC 2023
  13. Greedy Modality Selection via Approximate Submodular Maximization
    Runxiang Cheng*, Gargi Balasubramaniam*, Yifei He*, Yao-Hung Hubert Tsai, Han Zhao
    38th Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence
    UAI 2022
  14. Test-Case Prioritization for Configuration Testing
    Runxiang Cheng, Lingming Zhang, Darko Marinov, Tianyin Xu
    30th ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis
    ISSTA 2021 (ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award)
  15. Testing Configuration Changes in Context to Prevent Production Failures
    Xudong Sun*, Runxiang Cheng*, Jianyan Chen, Ran Ang, Owolabi Legunsen, Tianyin Xu
    14th USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation
    OSDI 2020
  16. A Visual Attention Grounding Neural Model for Multimodal Machine Translation
    Mingyang Zhou, Runxiang Cheng, Yong Jae Lee, Zhou Yu
    2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
    EMNLP 2018, Long Paper
  17. Gunrock: Building A Human-Like Social Bot By Leveraging Large Scale Real User Data
    Chun-Yen Chen, Dian Yu, Weiming Wen, Yi Mang Yang, Jiaping Zhang, Mingyang Zhou, Kevin Jesse, Austin Chau, Antara Bhowmick, Shreenath Iyer, Giritheja Sreenivasulu, Runxiang Cheng, Ashwin Bhandare, Zhou Yu
    2018 Alexa Prize Socialbot Grand Challenge (Champion Team)

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