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 build vertical AI agents for coding and security by engineering three layers of the harness:

  • Context Engineering distills large-scale, domain-specific knowledge corpora into structured, retrievable substrates surfaced to agents on demand.
  • Inference-Time Scaling deepens agent reasoning through guided search and execution-grounded feedback.
  • Agent Workflow Design orchestrates tool use within sandboxed environments to form closed-loop, self-improving systems.

Internships & Experience

  • Research intern, NEC Laboratories America, Inc., advised by Dr. Wei Cheng, Princeton, NJ, 05/2026-present, working on code-generated world models for verifiable environments.
  • Research intern, NEC Laboratories America, Inc., advised by Dr. Wei Cheng, Princeton, NJ, 01/2026-3/2026, working on inference-time scaling for code documentation and test generation with execution feedback.
  • Research intern, DeepWisdom, Remote, 10/2024-12/2024, working on testing LLM-generated software with static and dynamic analysis in sandboxed environments.

Awards

  • 2025 CCI SWVA Cyber Innovation Scholarship.
  • 2024 CCI SWVA Cyber Innovation Scholarship.
  • 2024 Bitshares Fellowship.

Services

  • Reviewer, ICML 2026, NeurIPS 2026, COLM 2026.
  • Student Organizer, 2024 DMV Security Workshop.

Selected Publications

  1. ICML 2026
    Escaping Whack-a-Mole: Code Documentation Optimization via Dependency-Guided Bi-level Search
    Yutong Cheng , Haifeng Chen, Wenchao Yu, Xujiang Zhao, Peng Gao, and Wei Cheng
    In Proceedings of the 43rd International Conference on Machine Learning, ICML, 2026
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  2. EACL 2026
    NL2Logic: AST Guided Translation of Natural Language into First-Order Logic with Large Language Models
    Rizky Ramadhana Putra, Raihan Sultan Pasha Basuki,  Yutong Cheng , and Peng Gao
    In Findings of the 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, EACL, 2026
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  3. arXiv
    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
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  4. Euro S&P 2025
    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.
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  5. 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
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