CiCi Yutong Cheng

Ph.D. candidate @Virginia Tech, Department of Computer Science.

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About Me

I am a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Computer Science at Virginia Tech, advised by Prof. Peng Gao. I received my B.Eng. in Software Engineering from BJTU. My research focuses on:

  • AI Agent Security
  • AI-Driven Security Operation

Internships & Experience

  • Algorithm development intern at MetaGPT, Remote, 10/2024-12/2024
  • Algorithm development intern at AtomEcho, Beijing, 6/2023-12/2023
  • Backend development intern, Yuewen Group, Tencent, Beijing, 6/2020-9/2020

News

Oct 23, 2025 💛𝒥ℴ𝒷 I will join NEC Laboratories America, Inc. as a PhD Research Intern in Spring 2026!
Mar 20, 2025 🩷𝒞𝒶𝓅𝓈𝓉ℴ𝓃ℯ I passed my PhD qualification exam and advanced to PhD candidacy!
Mar 13, 2025 🩵𝒜𝔀𝒶𝓇𝒹 I have been selected for the 2025 CCI SWVA Cyber Innovation Scholarship.
Feb 12, 2025 💜𝒫𝒶𝓅𝑒𝓇 Our paper, “CTINEXUS: Automatic Cyber Threat Intelligence Knowledge Graph Construction Using Large Language Models” has been accepted by Euro S&P 2025.
Sep 09, 2024 🩵𝒜𝔀𝒶𝓇𝒹 I have been selected by the Bitshares Fellowship.
Sep 05, 2024 🤍𝒮𝓮𝑟𝓋𝒾𝓬𝓮 I started serving as the lab lead of the VT Security & Intelligence Lab from this semester.
Mar 12, 2024 🩵𝒜𝔀𝒶𝓇𝒹 I have been selected for the 2024 CCI SWVA Cyber Innovation Scholarship.
Mar 04, 2024 🤍𝒮𝓮𝑟𝓋𝒾𝓬𝓮 I served as the student organizer of the 2024 DMV Security Workshop.
Jan 21, 2024 🩷𝒞𝒶𝓅𝓈𝓉ℴ𝓃ℯ I started my PhD journey in Computer Science at Virginia Tech, Go Hokies 🦃!
Nov 01, 2023 💜𝒫𝒶𝓅𝑒𝓇 Our paper “Hue: A User-Adaptive Parser for Hybrid Logs” has been accepted by ESEC/FSE 2023.

Selected Publications

  1. CTIArena: Benchmarking LLM Knowledge and Reasoning Across Heterogeneous Cyber Threat Intelligence
    Yutong Cheng , Yang Liu, Changze Li, Dawn Song, and Peng Gao
    In Preprint, 2025
  2. CTINEXUS: Automatic Cyber Threat Intelligence Knowledge Graph Construction Using Large Language Models
    Yutong Cheng , Osama Bajaber, Saimon Amanuel Tsegai, Dawn Song, and Peng Gao
    In Proceedings of the 10th IEEE European Symposium on Security and Privacy, Euro S&P, 2025
    Adopted by cybersecurity companies (ThreatConnect, Palo Alto Networks) for automated threat intelligence analysis.
  3. ESEC/FSE 2023
    Hue: A user-adaptive parser for hybrid logs
    Junjielong Xu, Qiuai Fu, Zhouruixing Zhu,  Yutong Cheng , Zhijing Li, Yuchi Ma, and Pinjia He
    In Proceedings of the 31st ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering, ESEC/FSE, 2023