Chunyang Chen
Research in software engineering, AI, LLMs, mobile systems, HCI, accessibility, and security
I am a professor in the Department of Computer Science at School of CIT, Technical University of Munich, Heilbronn Campus. I obtained my PhD from Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore, and my research spans software engineering, AI, deep learning, natural language processing, and human-computer interaction. My first name, "Chunyang," sounds like "train young," which is exactly my job in the university.
Research focus
Specifically, I apply AI, machine learning, NLP, and lightweight program analysis techniques in the following directions:
- AI(LLM)-assisted automated mobile app development including requirement elicitation [ICSE'19a, TSE'22], UI design [CSCW'19, CSCW'20, ICSE'21a], UI code generation [ICSE'18, TOSEM'20, FSE'20], app GUI testing [CHI'22, ICSE'23a, ICSE'23b], usability [ICSE'20a, ASE'20, ASE'22], accessibility testing [ICSE'20b, TSE'21], and bug replay [ICSE'22, ICSE'23, ICSE'24].
- AI-empowered mining software repositories including library/API migration [ASE'18a, TSE'19a], collaborative editing [CSCW'17, CSCW'18, CSCW'21], query reformulation [ASE'16, ICSE'21c], and thesaurus construction [ICSE'17, TSE'19].
- Robustness and security of deep learning and mobile apps including on-device model attack [ICSE'21-SEIP, TIFS'22], backdoor attack [ICSE'21d], phishing attack [TDSC'19], and deep learning defence [ASE'18, ISSTA'23].
- Agentic LLMs for software engineering and HCI including software testing [ICSE'23, ICSE'24a, ICSE'24b, TSE'24], bug replay [ISSTA'24, ICSE'24c, ICSE'24d], software accessibility [CHI'24], smart assistant development [UIST'24], and dataset construction [CHI'24]. All LLM-relevant works can be found on the dedicated page.
News
- 2026 Jan, we received the Gemini Academic Program Award from Google Cloud.
- 2025 Nov, we received the Amazon Research Award in Agentic AI track.
- 2025 Oct, we received the ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award in ASE 2025 for “Seeing is Fixing: Cross-Modal Reasoning with Multimodal LLMs for Visual Software Issue Fixing”.
- 2024 May, we received the Best Paper Honorable Mention in CHI 2024.
Open positions
I am always looking for self-motivated PhD students with full scholarship through the open positions page, as well as long-term visiting scholars, postdocs and students. For master and bachelor students at TUM, we provide a list of thesis projects, please follow the instructions there.
Awards
- Gemini Academic Program Award from Google Cloud
- ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award in ASE 2025 PDF
- Amazon Research Award in AWS Agentic AI 2025
- Best Paper Honorable Mention in CHI 2024 PDF
- Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) from Australian Research Council
- ACM SIGSOFT Early Career Researcher Award 2023
- ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award in ICSE 2023 PDF
- ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award in ICSE 2021 PDF
- Dean's Award for Research Impact (Economic and Social Impact) in Faculty of IT, Monash University
- Facebook Research Award in Probability and Programming 2020
- ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award in ICSE 2020 PDF
- ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award in ASE 2018 PDF
- Best Paper Award in SANER 2016 PDF
- Best Tool Demo in ASE 2016 PDF
Selected recent publications
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[ICSE-26] Breaking Single-Tester Limits: Multi-Agent LLMs for Multi-User Feature Testing
IEEE/ACM International Conference on Software Engineering
Sidong Feng, Changhao Du, Huaxiao Liu, Qingnan Wang, Zhengwei Lv, Mengfei Wang, Chunyang Chen
PDF -
[ICSE-26] A Semantic-based Optimization Approach for Repairing LLMs: Case Study on Code Generation
IEEE/ACM International Conference on Software Engineering
Jian Gu, Aldeida Aleti, Chunyang Chen, Hongyu Zhang
PDF -
[ICSE-26] Repair Ingredients Are All You Need: Improving Large Language Model-Based Program Repair via Repair Ingredients Search
IEEE/ACM International Conference on Software Engineering
Jiayi Zhang, Kai Huang, Jian Zhang, Yang Liu, Chunyang Chen
PDF -
[ICSE-26] Think Outside the Box: Automating Inter-App Functionality Testing via Memory Implanting and Reasoning
IEEE/ACM International Conference on Software Engineering
Mengzhuo Chen, Zhe Liu, Chunyang Chen, Junjie Wang, Yangguang Xue, Boyu Wu, Libin Wu, Qing Wang
PDF forthcoming -
[ASE-25] Seeing is Fixing: Cross-Modal Reasoning with Multimodal LLMs for Visual Software Issue Fixing
ACM/IEEE International Conference on Automated Software Engineering
Kai Huang, Jian Zhang, Xiaofei Xie, Chunyang Chen
PDF ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award Top in SWE-bench-MultiModal -
[TOSEM-25] An Empirical Study on Challenges for LLM Developers
ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology
Xiang Chen, Chaoyang Gao, Chunyang Chen, Guangbei Zhang, Yong Liu
PDF -
[TSE-24] Software Testing with Large Language Model: Survey, Landscape, and Vision
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
Junjie Wang, Yuchao Huang, Chunyang Chen, Zhe Liu, Song Wang, Qing Wang
PDF
See more papers in the full list, and recent LLM-related works on the LLM publications page.
Supervision
Postdoc
- Shengcheng Yu (Feb.2025-), Technical University of Munich
-
Yanqi Su (Sep.2024-), Technical University of Munich
- Lecturer at University of Western Australia
-
Mark Huasong Meng (Sep.2024-Oct.2025), Technical University of Munich
- Assistant Professor at Dublin City University (DCU)
- Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship
- Wenchao Gu (Jun.2024-Oct.2025), Technical University of Munich
PhD
- Emilija Gjorgjevska (Jan.2026-), Technical University of Munich
- Zhen Tao (Feb.2025-), Technical University of Munich
- Lianlian Qi (Dec.2024-), Technical University of Munich (with Austrian Institute of Technology)
- Zixu Wang (Dec.2024-), Technical University of Munich (with Infineon)
- Ezgi Sarıkayak (Nov.2024-), Technical University of Munich (with Siemens)
- Kai Huang (Nov.2024-), Technical University of Munich
- Shen Hu (Nov.2024-), Technical University of Munich
- Yuetian Mao (Jun.2024-), Technical University of Munich
-
Ludwig Felder (Jun.2024-), Technical University of Munich
- Software Campus Funds
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Sidong Feng (May.2023-Feb.2026), Monash University
- Amazon Research Award 2025
- Dean's Award for Excellence by a Graduate Research Student, Monash 2025
- Chinese Government Award for Outstanding Self-financed Students Abroad 2024
- ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award at ICSE 2023
- Assistant Professor in Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen.
-
Yujin Huang (Dec.2022- 2025), Monash University -> University of Melbourne (Co-supervised with Xingliang Yuan)
- Dean's Award for Excellence by a Graduate Research Student 2023, Monash
- Research Fellow, University of Melbourne.
- Jian Gu (Nov.2022-), Monash University (Co-supervised with Aldeida Aleti)
-
Han Wang (May.2021-Nov.2024), Monash University
- Software Engineer in InvestorHub.
- Dean's Award for Excellence by a Graduate Research Student 2022, Monash
- Han Hu (Jan.2021-Jul.2024), Monash University
-
Suyu Ma (Mar.2020-Aug.2024), Monash University (Co-supervised with John Grundy)
- Research Scientist in Data61, CSIRO.
-
Jieshan Chen (Aug.2018-Feb.2022), Australian National University (Co-supervised with Zhenchang Xing)
- Senior Research Scientist in Data61, CSIRO.
- ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award at ICSE 2020
Visiting/Remote students
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Zhe Liu (Jan.2020-Jun.2023), Chinese Academy of Sciences
- Associate Professor at Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences.
- Best Paper Honorable Mention in CHI 2024
- ACM Student Research Competition Grand Finals Winner, 2023
- Yuhui Su (Jul.2020-Aug.2022), Chinese Academy of Sciences
- Tianming Zhao (Jan.2019-Dec.2020), Jilin University
- Kaibo Cao (Jul.2019-Dec.2020), Nanjing University
- Zhidan Yuan (Sep.2019-Dec.2019), Nantong University
- Dun Zhang (Jan.2019-Apr.2019), Nantong University
Teaching
- CITHN2014 / CITHN4004 - Foundations and Application of Generative AI, TUM (2024-now)
- CITHN3003 - Advanced Topics on Software Engineering, TUM (2024-now)
- INHN0015 - Seminar Automated Mobile App Testing, TUM (2024)
- FIT3170 - Software Engineering Practice, Monash (2021-2023)
- FIT9136 - Algorithms and Programming Foundations in Python, Monash (2020)
- FIT9133 - Programming Foundations in Python, Monash (2019)
- CZ3003 - Software Systems Analysis & Design, NTU (2015-2017)
- CE2006 - Software Engineering, NTU (2016)
- CZ2002 - Object-Oriented Design & Programming, NTU (2016)
Service
Organisation
- Guest Editor, Special Issue on When Software Security Meets Large Language Models: Opportunities and Challenges, Springer Empirical Software Engineering
- Schedule Co-Chair: 45th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE-23)
- Volunteer Co-Chair: IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE-21)
- Keynote at Doctoral Symposium: IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME-21)
- Student Research Competition Co-Chair: IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE-20)
- Guest Editor, Special Issue on Automated Software Engineering for Mobile Applications, Springer Automated Software Engineering
Program Committee or Area Chair
- International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE-27, 26, 25, 24, 23)
- ACM Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE-27, 26, 25, 24)
- IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE-26, 25, 24, 23, 22)
- ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis (ISSTA-26, 25, 24)
- IEEE International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering (ISSRE-24)
- ACM SIGCHI Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing (CSCW-24)
- International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-23, 22, 21)
- The ACM International Conference on Supporting Group Work (GROUP-22)
- The International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME-22, 21, 20, 18)
- ACM Student Research Competition (SRC-22, 21)
- ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST-21) reviewer
- Mining Software Repositories (MSR-23, 22, 21, 20, 19)
- Asian Conference on Machine Learning (ACML-21, 20)
- International Workshop on Realizing Artificial Intelligence Synergies in Software Engineering (RAISE-21, 20)
- IEEE International Conference on Program Comprehension, Replication and Negative Results Track (ICPC-21)
- International Conference on Predictive Models and Data Analysis in Software Engineering (PROMISE-21)
- IEEE International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution and Reengineering (SANER-23, 20, 19)
- Asia-Pacific Software Engineering Conference (APSEC-20)
- Asia-Pacific Symposium on Internetware (Internetware-20, 21, 22)
- IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering, tool track (ASE-19)
Journal Reviewer
- Nature Machine Intelligence (NMI)
- Communications of the ACM
- IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering (TSE)
- ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (TOSEM)
- IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing (TDSC)
- IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security (TIFS)
- IEEE Transactions on Reliability (TRel)
- Springer Empirical Software Engineering (EMSE)
- Springer Automated Software Engineering (AUSE)
- Elsevier Journal of Systems and Software (JSS)
- IEEE Software
- Journal of Software: Evolution and Process
- Journal of Computer Science and Technology (JCST)
- International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction (IJHCI)
Funding Reviewer
- DFG - Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft
- DP, DECRA, LP, Australian Research Council
- Luxembourg National Research Fund
- Singapore Ministry of Education (MOE) Tier 3
- Eliteprogramm für Postdoktorandinnen und Postdoktoranden der Baden-Württemberg Stiftung