Introduction

Currently, I'm a PhD student at Singapore Management University supervised by Prof. David Lo, where I'm expected to graduate in August 2026. Prior to joining SMU, I received my Bachelor's and Master's degrees from Tongji University. I also gained valuable research experience working as a Research Assistant at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University and ShanghaiTech University.

My research lies at the intersection of software engineering and artificial intelligence. My mission is to engineer a software ecosystem natively designed for both human developers and AI coders, aiming to maximize the productivity of both.

Feel free to reach out to me if you are also interested in exploring these topics!

📢 I will join the Data Science and Analytics (DSA) Thrust at The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou) as an Assistant Professor in January 2027. I am recruiting self-motivated PhD/MPhil students and Research Assistants (RAs) to join my group — feel free to drop me an email with your CV!

Awards

2026 | ACM SIGSOFT distinguished paper award (ICSE 2026)
2026 | ACM SIGSOFT distinguished paper award (ICSE 2026) (for disambiguation: I won this award twice at ICSE'26)
2025 | SMU SCIS Dean's List Award
2025 | SMU SCIS Research Excellence Award (Tier 1)
2024 | ByteDance Scholarship (15 of 400+ applicants from all areas of computer science)
2024 | ACM SIGSOFT distinguished paper award (ISSTA 2024)
2022 | Nomination for ACM SIGSOFT distinguished paper award (ICSE 2022)
2020 | Merit Student in Tongji University
2018 | Shanghai Outstanding Graduate

Services

PC Member (Conference) | MSR'24-26 (Data and Tool Showcase Track), QUATIC'25, MSR'25 (Junior PC), ISSTA'24 (Artifact Evaluation)
PC Member (Workshop) | AGENT'26, DL4C'24-25
Reviewer | TSE, TKDE, Neural Networks, Neurocomputing, IST, SCP
Social Media Co-Chair | FORGE'25

Publications

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RepoRescue: An Empirical Study of LLM Agents on Whole-Repository Compatibility Rescue
2026 arXiv
Zhihao Lin, Mingyi Zhou, Zhensu Sun, Yizhuo Yang, Renyu Yang, David Lo, Li Li
Are Performance-Optimization Benchmarks Reliably Measuring Coding Agents?
2026 arXiv
Zhi Chen, Zhensu Sun📧, Yuling Shi, David Lo, Lingxiao Jiang
To Run or Not to Run: Analyzing the Cost-Effectiveness of Code Execution in LLM-Based Program Repair
2026 ISSTA
Zhihao Lin, Junhua Zhu, Mingyi Zhou, Xin Wang, Zhensu Sun, Renyu Yang, David Lo, Li Li
Executing as You Generate: Hiding Execution Latency in LLM Code Interpreters
2026 arXiv
Zhensu Sun👥, Zhihao Lin👥, Zhi Chen, Chengran Yang, Mingyi Zhou, Li Li, David Lo
Rethinking the Value of Agent-Generated Tests for LLM-Based Software Engineering Agents
2026 arXiv
Zhi Chen, Zhensu Sun📧, Yuling Shi, Chao Peng, Xiaodong Gu, David Lo, Lingxiao Jiang
CodeOCR: On the Effectiveness of Vision Language Models in Code Understanding
2026 ISSTA
Yuling Shi, Chaoxiang Xie, Zhensu Sun, Yeheng Chen, Chenxu Zhang, Longfei Yun, Chengcheng Wan, Hongyu Zhang, David Lo, Xiaodong Gu
Autoregressive, Yet Revisable: In Decoding Revision for Secure Code Generation
2026 ICML
Chengran Yang, Zichao Wei, Heminghao Deng, Jinfeng Jiang, Zhensu Sun, Ting Zhang, Tianyi Wu, Ming Wen, David Lo
LIDL: LLM Integration Defect Localization via Knowledge Graph-Enhanced Multi-Agent Analysis
2026 arXiv
Gou Tan, Zilong He, Min Li, Pengfei Chen, Jieke Shi, Zhensu Sun, Ting Zhang, Danwen Chen, Lwin Khin Shar, Chuanfu Zhang, David Lo
The Hidden Cost of Readability: How Code Formatting Silently Consumes Your LLM Budget
2026 ICSE Distinguished Paper
Dangfeng Pan👥, Zhensu Sun👥, Cenyuan Zhang, David Lo, Xiaoning Du
Think Like Human Developers: Harnessing Community Knowledge for Structured Code Reasoning
2026 ICSE Distinguished Paper
Chengran Yang, Zhensu Sun📧, Hong Jin Kang, Jieke Shi, David Lo
Towards Agentic Runtime Healing
2026 CACM
Zhensu Sun, Haotian Zhu, Bowen Xu, Xiaoning Du, Li Li, David Lo
FastMCC: Multiple-hypotheses Code Completion with Natural Language Phrases as Alternative Suggestions
2026 ICSE Student Research Competition
Zhensu Sun
Token Sugar: Making Source Code Sweeter for LLMs through Token-Efficient Shorthand
2025 ASE
Zhensu Sun, Chengran Yang, Xiaoning Du, Zhou Yang, Li Li, David Lo
Bridging Developer Instructions and Code Completion Through Instruction-Aware Fill-in-the-Middle Paradigm
2025 arXiv
Zhensu Sun, Chengran Yang, Chao Peng, Pengfei Gao, Xiaoning Du, Li Li, David Lo
FDI: Attack Neural Code Generation Systems through User Feedback Channel
2024 ISSTA
Zhensu Sun, Xiaoning Du, Xiapu Luo, Fu Song, David Lo, Li Li
AI Coders Are Among Us: Rethinking Programming Language Grammar Towards Efficient Code Generation
2024 ISSTA Distinguished Paper
Zhensu Sun, Xiaoning Du, Zhou Yang, Li Li, David Lo
When Neural Code Completion Models Size up the Situation: Attaining Cheaper and Faster Completion through Dynamic Model Inference
2024 ICSE
Zhensu Sun👥, Xiaoning Du👥, Fu Song, Shangwen Wang, Li Li
Fraud's Bargain Attack: Generating Adversarial Text Samples via Word Manipulation Process
2024 TKDE
Mingze Ni, Zhensu Sun, Wei Liu
Don't Complete It! Preventing Unhelpful Code Completion for Productive and Sustainable Neural Code Completion Systems
2024 TOSEM | 2023 ICSE Poster Track
Zhensu Sun, Xiaoning Du, Fu Song, Shangwen Wang, Mingze Ni, Li Li, David Lo
Fusing Code Searchers
2024 TSE
Shangwen Wang, Mingyang Geng, Bo Lin, Zhensu Sun, Ming Wen, Yepang Liu, Li Li, Tegawendé F Bissyandé, Xiaoguang Mao
Reversible jump attack to textual classifiers with modification reduction
2024 Machine Learning
Mingze Ni, Zhensu Sun, Wei Liu
CodeMark: Imperceptible Watermarking for Code Datasets against Neural Code Completion Models
2023 ESEC/FSE
Zhensu Sun👥, Xiaoning Du👥, Fu Song, Li Li
Natural Language to Code: How Far Are We?
2023 ESEC/FSE
Shangwen Wang, Mingyang Geng, Bo Lin, Zhensu Sun, Ming Wen, Yepang Liu, Li Li, Tegawendé F Bissyandé, Xiaoguang Mao
Two Birds with One Stone: Boosting Code Generation and Code Search via a Generative Adversarial Network
2023 OOPSLA
Shangwen Wang, Bo Lin, Zhensu Sun, Ming Wen, Yepang Liu, Yan Lei, Xiaoguang Mao
On the Importance of Building High-quality Training Datasets for Neural Code Search
2022 ICSE Nominated for Distinguished Paper
Zhensu Sun, Li Li, Yan Liu, Xiaoning Du, Li Li
CoProtector: Protect Open-Source Code against Unauthorized Training Usage with Data Poisoning
2022 WWW
Zhensu Sun, Xiaoning Du, Fu Song, Mingze Ni, Li Li
Req2Lib: A Semantic Neural Model for Software Library Recommendation
2020 SANER Early Research Achievement Track
Zhensu Sun, Yan Liu, Ziming Cheng, Chen Yang, Pengyu Che
Zhensu Sun

Zhensu Sun

(Generated by AI)

zhensuuu@gmail.com

School of Computing and Information Systems
Singapore Management University
80 Stamford Road, 178902
Singapore