About Me

I am an Associate Professor with the College of Computer Science and Technology at Huazhong University of Science and Technology (HUST), Wuhan, China. Prior to that, I got my Ph.D degree from Zhejiang University in Dec., 2019, under the supervision of Prof. Jian Wu and Prof. Zhou Zhao. I have been visiting Shenzhen Research Institute, Chinese University of Hong Kong, China (working with Prof. Zibin Zheng) in 2014, University of Technology Sydney, Australia (working with Prof. Guandong Xu) in 2016, and University of Illinois at Chicago, USA (working with Prof. Philip S. Yu) in 2018. My research interests are mainly focusing on the synergy between Artificial Intelligence and Software Engineering, especially on Natural Language Processing, Programming Languages, and Large Language Models.

(I am looking for highly-motivated under-graduate students with a strong passion to work with me. If interested, please drop me a message by email.)

Research Highlights

NaturalCC Logo

NaturalCC is an advanced sequence modeling toolkit designed to empower researchers and developers in training custom models for a myriad of software engineering tasks, including but are not limited to code summarization, code generation, code search, and type inference. Our vision is to seamlessly connect the realms of programming language and natural language, leveraging cutting-edge machine learning techniques. arXiv Code Homepage

Selected Publications

Deep Learning for Code Intelligence: Survey, Benchmark and Toolkit
Yao Wan, Yang He, Zhangqian Bi, Jianguo Zhang, Hongyu Zhang, Yulei Sui, Guandong Xu, Hai Jin, Philip Yu
ACM Computing Survey 2024.
PDF arXiv
Graph Neural Networks for Vulnerability Detection - A Counterfactual Explanation
Zhaoyang Chu, Yao Wan*, Qian Li, Yang Wu, Hongyu Zhang, Yulei Sui, Guandong Xu, Hai Jin
ISSTA 2024. The ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis
PDF CCF-A
Automated Data Visualization from Natural Language via Large Language Models: An Exploratory Study
Yang Wu#, Yao Wan#*, Hongyu Zhang, Yulei Sui, Wucai Wei, Wei Zhao, Guandong Xu, Hai Jin
SIGMOD 2024. ACM Special Interest Group on Management of Data
PDF CCF-A
IRCoCo: Immediate Rewards-Guided Deep Reinforcement Learning for Code Completion
Bolun Li, Zhihong Sun, Tao Huang, Hongyu Zhang, Yao Wan, Ge Li, Zhi Jin, Chen Lyu
FSE 2024.The ACM International Conference on the Foundations of Software Engineering
PDF arXiv CCF-A
You See What I Want You to See: Poisoning Vulnerabilities in Neural Code Search
Yao Wan, Shijie Zhang, Hongyu Zhang, Yulei Sui, Guandong Xu, Dezhong Yao, Hai Jin, and Lichao Sun
ESEC/FSE 2022. The 30th ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering.
PDF CCF-A
What Do They Capture? - A Structural Analysis of Pre-Trained Language Models for Source Code
Yao Wan, Wei Zhao, Hongyu Zhang, Yulei Sui, Guandong Xu and Hai Jin
ICSE 2022. The 44th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering
PDF CCF-A
Multi-Modal Attention Network Learning for Semantic Source Code Retrieval
Yao Wan, Jingdong Shu, Yulei Sui, Guandong Xu, Zhou Zhao, Jian Wu, Philip S. Yu
ASE 2019. The 34th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Automated Software Engineering
PDF Code CCF-A
Improving Automatic Source Code Summarization via Deep Reinforcement Learning
Yao Wan, Zhou Zhao, Min Yang, Guandong Xu, Haochao Ying, Jian Wu, Philip S. Yu
ASE 2018. The 33rd ACM/IEEE International Conference on Automated Software Engineering
PDF Code CCF-A

Professional Services

  Confenrence PC/Reviewer
  • ISSTA2024; ACL: 2023, 2022,2021; EMNLP: 2023,2022,2021; AAAI: 2022,2021; IJCAI: 2021; SIGKDD: 2024,2023,2022; WSDM: 2022; COLING: 2020; NLPCC: 2020; BESC: 2021, 2020
  Journal Reviewer
  • TSE: 2021; TKDE: 2021; WWWJ: 2017-2021; TRel: 2020