Aashish Yadavally

ECSS 4.417

The University of Texas at Dallas

Richardson, TX 75082

For starters, my first name is pronounced / ɑ:ʃi:ʃ /.

I am a fifth-year Ph.D. student in Computer Science at the University of Texas at Dallas, working with Dr. Tien N. Nguyen. My research lies at the intersection of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Software Engineering (SE). I explore if/how machine learning models understand program behaviors, particularly focusing on partial program analysis and software security. My work has been recognized with multiple honors, including the ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award at FSE 2024, the IEEE TCSE Distinguished Paper Award at SANER 2022, and a nomination at ICSE 2023.

* [Update] I will be starting as an Assistant Professor at the University of Central Florida in Fall 2025. If you are an Undergraduate, Master’s, or Ph.D. student interested in cutting-edge research in this exciting area, I’d love to hear from you!*

Broadly, my research interests can be summarized as follows:

Large Language Models for Reasoning on Source Code (ICSE’25, FORGE’24)
Artificial Intelligence for Program Analysis (FSE’24, OOPSLA’24, ESEC/FSE’23, ICSE’23)
Artificial Intelligence for Software Security (ICSE’24, ESEC/FSE’23, ICSE’23)
Source Code Manipulation for Software Engineering Applications (ASE’22, ASE’22-NIER, SANER’22)

Throughout my academic journey, I have been fortunate to work under the guidance of/with wonderful people and researchers in:
Dr. David Shaohua Wang is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Informatics, New Jersey Institute of Technology.
Dr. Frederick Maier is the Associate Director of the Institute for Artificial Intelligence, University of Georgia.
Dr. Hemant Patil heads the Speech Research Lab, and is a Professor at the Dhirubhai Ambani Institute for Information and Communication Technology (DA-IICT).

You can find me at the following Conferences or Events
2024 OOPSLA (Pasadena, CA, USA), FSE (Porto de Galinhas, Brazil)
2023 ESEC/FSE (San Francisco, CA, USA), ICSE (Melbourne, Australia)
2022 ASE (Detroit, MI, USA), ICSE (Pittsburgh, PA, USA), SANER (Virtual)

Favourite Quotes

“The future depends on what we do in the present.” ~ Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
“If you work with determination and with perfection, success will follow.” ~ Dhirubhai Ambani

news

Apr 1, 2025	Two papers accepted at FSE 2025.
Jan 1, 2025	Two papers accepted at ICSE 2025.
Dec 3, 2024	Successfully defended my Ph.D. Topic Proposal. Special thanks to my committee members, Drs. Tien N. Nguyen, Wei Yang, Shiyi Wei, and Baishakhi Ray.
Jul 15, 2024	Will be attending FSE 2024 at Porto de Galinhas, Brazil.
Jun 23, 2024	ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award at FSE 2024!
May 19, 2024	Will be joining Amazon as an Applied Scientist Intern for the summer!
Apr 17, 2024	Received Distinguished Reviewer Award at MSR 2024!

selected publications

Large Language Models for Safe Minimization

Aashish Yadavally, Xiaokai Rong, Phat Nguyen, and Tien N. Nguyen

2025

Bib PDF

@article{YadavallyRNN25,
  author = {Yadavally, Aashish and Rong, Xiaokai and Nguyen, Phat and Nguyen, Tien N.},
  title = {Large Language Models for Safe Minimization},
  year = {2025},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/ACM 47th International Conference on Software Engineering},
  pages = {To Appear},
  publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
  location = {Ottawa, Canada},
  series = {ICSE '25},
}

Predictive Program Slicing via Execution Knowledge-Guided Dynamic Dependence Learning

Aashish Yadavally, Yi Li, and Tien N. Nguyen

Proc. ACM Soft. Engg., 2024

🏆 ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award

Bib PDF

@article{fse24,
  author = {Yadavally, Aashish and Li, Yi and Nguyen, Tien N.},
  title = {Predictive Program Slicing via Execution Knowledge-Guided Dynamic Dependence Learning},
  journal = {Proc. {ACM} Soft. Engg.},
  volume = {1},
  number = {{FSE}},
  pages = {271-292},
  year = {2024},
  note = {ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award},
  award = {true}
}

A Learning-Based Approach to Static Program Slicing

Aashish Yadavally, Yi Li, Shaohua Wang, and Tien N. Nguyen

In , Apr 2024

Bib PDF

@inproceedings{oopsla24,
  author = {Yadavally, Aashish and Li, Yi and Wang, Shaohua and Nguyen, Tien N.},
  title = {A Learning-Based Approach to Static Program Slicing},
  year = {2024},
  issue_date = {April 2024},
  publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
  address = {New York, NY, USA},
  volume = {8},
  number = {OOPSLA1},
  journal = {Proc. ACM Program. Lang.},
  month = apr,
  articleno = {97},
  numpages = {27},
}

Commit-Level, Neural Vulnerability Detection and Assessment

Yi Li, Aashish Yadavally, Jiaxing Zhang, Shaohua Wang, and Tien N. Nguyen

In ESEC/SIGSOFT FSE, Apr 2023

Bib PDF Slides

@inproceedings{DBLP:conf/sigsoft/LiYZWN23,
  author = {Li, Yi and Yadavally, Aashish and Zhang, Jiaxing and Wang, Shaohua and Nguyen, Tien N.},
  title = {Commit-Level, Neural Vulnerability Detection and Assessment},
  booktitle = {{ESEC/SIGSOFT} {FSE}},
  pages = {1024--1036},
  publisher = {{ACM}},
  year = {2023},
}

(Partial) Program Dependence Learning

Aashish Yadavally, Tien N. Nguyen, Wenbo Wang, and Shaohua Wang

In ICSE, Apr 2023

🏆 Nominated for ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award

Bib PDF Slides

@inproceedings{DBLP:conf/icse/YadavallyNWW23,
  author = {Yadavally, Aashish and Nguyen, Tien N. and Wang, Wenbo and Wang, Shaohua},
  title = {(Partial) Program Dependence Learning},
  booktitle = {{ICSE}},
  pages = {2501--2513},
  publisher = {{IEEE}},
  year = {2023},
  note = {ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award},
  nomination = {true}
}

DeepVD: Toward Class-Separation Features for Neural Network Vulnerability Detection

Wenbo Wang, Tien N. Nguyen, Shaohua Wang, Yi Li, Jiyuan Zhang, and Aashish Yadavally

In ICSE, Apr 2023

Bib PDF Slides

@inproceedings{DBLP:conf/icse/WangNWLZY23,
  author = {Wang, Wenbo and Nguyen, Tien N. and Wang, Shaohua and Li, Yi and Zhang, Jiyuan and Yadavally, Aashish},
  title = {DeepVD: Toward Class-Separation Features for Neural Network Vulnerability
                    Detection},
  booktitle = {{ICSE}},
  pages = {2249--2261},
  publisher = {{IEEE}},
  year = {2023},
}

Phrase2Set: Phrase-to-Set Machine Translation and Its Software Engineering Applications

Thanh V. Nguyen, Aashish Yadavally, and Tien N. Nguyen

In SANER, Apr 2022

🏆 IEEE TCSE Distinguished Paper Award

Bib PDF

@inproceedings{DBLP:conf/wcre/NguyenYN22,
  author = {Nguyen, Thanh V. and Yadavally, Aashish and Nguyen, Tien N.},
  title = {Phrase2Set: Phrase-to-Set Machine Translation and Its Software Engineering
                    Applications},
  booktitle = {{SANER}},
  pages = {502--513},
  publisher = {{IEEE}},
  year = {2022},
  note = {IEEE TCSE Distinguished Paper Award},
  award = {true}
}