Chenyu Zhao · Ph.D. Researcher · Nankai University

AI for Reliable Systems

Building intelligent, observable, and resilient systems for real-world operations.

I am a Ph.D. student in Software Engineering at Nankai University, studying how AI can make complex software systems more dependable. My research spans agentic failure diagnosis and recovery, reliable software engineering agents, AI system evaluation, and intelligent operations for cloud and distributed systems.

Before my Ph.D., I spent two years as an R&D engineer at Alibaba Cloud Intelligence Group, working with large-scale production systems. That experience in observability, failure diagnosis, and operational automation grounds my research in real-world constraints. My goal is to bridge research and practice by building intelligent, observable, and resilient technologies for cloud computing and other critical infrastructure.

Agentic Reliability EngineeringAI System EvaluationAI AgentsAIOps

News

2026.08:I am organizing an ICSE Challenge.
2026.07:Our paper “Debugging the Debuggers” was accepted to the Industry Showcase Track at ASE 2026.
2026.06:Our paper “EvidenT” was accepted to ISSTA 2026.
2026.05:Our paper “Can Language Models Go Beyond Coding?” was published in ACM TOSEM.
2025.11–2026.11:I am a research intern with the Advertising Team at Alimama.
2025.09:I started my Ph.D. study in Software Engineering at Nankai University.
2025.09:Our paper “Bridging Edge and Cloud” was accepted by IEEE TSC.
2025.07:Our paper “Integrating GraphSAGE and Mamba” was accepted to ISSRE 2025.
2025.07:Our paper “LogEval” was accepted by Empirical Software Engineering.
2025.05:Our paper “FlowXpert” was accepted to KDD 2025.
2025.03:Our paper “LLM-Augmented Ticket Aggregation” was accepted to FSE 2025.

Research

A coherent research agenda connecting AI, software systems, and reliability.

Agentic Reliability Engineering

Reliable agents for failure diagnosis, recovery, software repair, and complex system-level tasks, with an emphasis on evidence preservation and structured self-recovery.

AI System Reliability & Evaluation

Evaluation, robustness, safety, and resilience of AI systems and agents operating beyond code generation in realistic software environments.

Cloud & Distributed Systems Intelligence

AIOps, observability, anomaly detection, failure diagnosis, and repair for cloud, microservice, and distributed systems under noisy production signals.

AI for Critical Infrastructure

A long-term application direction exploring how reliable intelligent technologies can support cloud, communications, energy, and transportation infrastructure.

Experience

Education and industry experience.

2025.09 — Present

Nankai University

Ph.D. Student · College of Software

2023.07 — 2025.07

Alibaba Cloud Intelligence Group

R&D Engineer

2020.09 — 2023.06

Nankai University

M.S. in Software Engineering · College of Software

2016.09 — 2020.06

Nankai University

B.S. in Software Engineering · College of Software

Publications

11 selected publications · 8 at CCF A venues.

Listed in reverse chronological order. * Corresponding author

ASE'26

Debugging the Debuggers: Failure-Anchored Structured Recovery for Software Engineering Agents

CCF A

Conference ACM/IEEE International Conference on Automated Software Engineering · Industry Showcase Track

Chenyu Zhao, Shenglin Zhang*, Yihang Lin, Wenwei Gu, Zhimin Chen, Yongqian Sun, Dan Pei, Chetan Bansal, Saravan Rajmohan, Minghua Ma.

TOSEM'26

Can Language Models Go Beyond Coding? Assessing the Capability of Language Models to Build Real-World Systems

CCF A

Journal ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology

Chenyu Zhao, Shenglin Zhang*, Zeshun Huang, Weilin Jin, Yongqian Sun, Dan Pei, Chaoyun Zhang, Qingwei Lin, Chetan Bansal, Saravan Rajmohan, Minghua Ma.

ISSTA'26

EvidenT: An Evidence-Preserving Framework for Iterative System-Level Package Repair

CCF A

Conference ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis

Chenyu Zhao, Minghua Ma*, Shenglin Zhang, Zeshun Huang, Yongqian Sun, Chetan Bansal, Saravan Rajmohan, Dan Pei.

TSC'25

Bridging Edge and Cloud: A Knowledge-Enhanced Framework for Efficient Time Series Anomaly Detection

CCF A

Journal IEEE Transactions on Services Computing

Shenglin Zhang, Jiacheng Zhang, Guohua Liu, Shiqi Chen, Chenyu Zhao, Minghua Ma, Yutong Chen, Yongqian Sun*, Dan Pei.

ISSRE'25

Integrating GraphSAGE and Mamba for Self-Supervised Spatio-Temporal Fault Detection in Microservice Systems

CCF B

Conference IEEE International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering

Shenglin Zhang, Yingke Li, Jianjin Tang, Chenyu Zhao, Wenwei Gu, Yongqian Sun*, Dan Pei.

EMSE

LogEval: A Comprehensive Benchmark Suite for LLMs in Log Analysis

CCF B

Journal Empirical Software Engineering

Tianyu Cui, Shiyu Ma, Ziang Chen, Tong Xiao, Chenyu Zhao, Shimin Tao, Yilun Liu, Shenglin Zhang*, Duoming Lin, Changchang Liu, Yuzhe Cai, Weibin Meng, Yongqian Sun, Dan Pei.

KDD'25

FlowXpert: Expertizing Troubleshooting Workflow Orchestration with Knowledge Base and Multi-Agent Coevolution

CCF A

Conference ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining

Binpeng Shi, Yu Luo, Jingya Wang, Yongxin Zhao, Shenglin Zhang*, Bowen Hao, Chenyu Zhao, Yongqian Sun, Zhi Zhang, Ronghua Sun, Haihua Li, Wei Song, Xiaolong Chen, Jingbo Miao, Dan Pei.

FSE'25

LLM-Augmented Ticket Aggregation for Low-cost Mobile OS Defect Resolution

CCF A

Conference ACM International Conference on the Foundations of Software Engineering

Yongqian Sun, Bowen Hao, Xiaotian Wang, Chenyu Zhao, Yongxin Zhao, Binpeng Shi, Shenglin Zhang*, Qiao Ge, Wenhu Li, Hua Wei, Dan Pei.

TSC'24

No More Data Silos: Unified Microservice Failure Diagnosis with Temporal Knowledge Graph

CCF A

Journal IEEE Transactions on Services Computing

Shenglin Zhang, Yongxin Zhao, Sibo Xia, Shirui Wei, Yongqian Sun*, Chenyu Zhao, Shiyu Ma, Junhua Kuang, Bolin Zhu, Lemeng Pan, Yicheng Guo, Dan Pei.

KDD'23

Robust Multimodal Failure Detection for Microservice Systems

CCF A

Conference ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining

Chenyu Zhao, Minghua Ma, Zhenyu Zhong, Shenglin Zhang*, Zhiyuan Tan, Xiao Xiong, Lulu Yu, Jiayi Feng, Yongqian Sun, Yuzhi Zhang, Dan Pei, Qingwei Lin, Dongmei Zhang.