I am a professor in the School of Computer Science and Technology at the Beijing Institute of Technology. I was formerly a graduate student at the Software Engineering Institute, Peking University. I defended my PhD thesis in June 2008.

My research interests include deep learning based software engineering, in particular: deep learning based program generation; software refactoring; automatic program repair; software quality; machine learning based code complete; automatic construction of software engineering datasets. My work is funded in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China, and the National Key Research and Development Program of China.

I am a recipient of the ACM Distinguished Paper Award from 31st ACM  Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (ESEC/FSE 2023) and 44th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2022), the RE'2021 Best Research Paper Award (2021), IET Software Premium Award (2018), New Century Excellent Talents in University (2013), and Beijing Higher Education Young Elite Teacher (2013). I am also a distinguished member of China Computer Federation (中国计算机学会杰出会员), and Secretary-General of the CCF Technical Committee on Software Engineering (TCSE).

 

I am always looking for self-motivated students to work with me. Contact me by eMail if you are interested in deep learning, software engineering, natural language processing, or data mining.

News:

*  2025/3/7: Our paper “An Automated Approach to Discovering Software Refactorings by Comparing Successive Versions” has been accepted by IEEE TSE

*  2025/1/15: Our paper “Has My Code Been Stolen for Model Training? A Naturalness Based Approach to Code Contamination Detection” has been accepted by FSE 2025

*  2025/1/15: Our paper “LLM-based Method Name Suggestion with Automatically Generated Context-Rich Prompts” has been accepted by FSE 2025

*  2025/1/15: Our paper “Automated Recommendation of Extracting Local Variable Refactorings” has been accepted by ACM TOSEM

*  2024/12/23: Our paper “Recommending Variable Names for Extract Local Variable Refactorings” has been accepted by ACM TOSEM

*  2024/12/09: Our paper “An Empirical Study on Common Sense-Violating Bugs in Mobile Apps” has been accepted by ACM TOSEM

*  Our paper “Shortening Overlong Method Names with Abbreviations” has been accepted by ACM TOSEM

*  Our paper “A Position-Aware Approach to Decomposing God Classes” has been accepted by ASE 2024

*  Our paper “Context-Aware Name Recommendation for Field Renaming” has been accepted by ICSE 2024

Contributions to Open Source Community：

l  Merged into Eclipse: Improve the safety of Extract Local Variable Refactorings concering ClassCasts #331 #333 (https://github.com/eclipse-jdt/eclipse.jdt.ui/pull/333#issuecomment-1347076136)

l  Merged into Eclipse: Improve the safety of Extract Local Variable Refactorings, concerning NullPointerException #39 (https://github.com/eclipse-jdt/eclipse.jdt.ui/commit/2987007d9703de02eea83081a0b7b65fdc6e4a84)

l  Merged into Eclipse: Improve the safety of "Extract Local Variable" refactorings by identifying statements that may change the value of the extracted expressions #432 #439 (https://github.com/eclipse-jdt/eclipse.jdt.ui/pull/439)

l  Merged into Eclipse: Automated name recommendation for Extract Local Variable Refactoring (https://github.com/eclipse-jdt/eclipse.jdt.ui/issues/601)

l  Merged into Eclipse: Context-based Automated Name Recommendation For The Extract Local Variable Refactoring #655 (https://github.com/eclipse-jdt/eclipse.jdt.ui/pull/656#issuecomment-1648693226)

Community Service (Since 2020)

Research (Full publication list available at DBLP) 中国计算机学会推荐A类顶级期刊/会议

 

[1]. Taiming Wang, Hui Liu*, Yuxia Zhang, Yanjie Jiang. Recommending Variable Names for Extract Local Variable Refactorings. ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology. 2024. CCF-A

[2]. Fu Fan, Yanjie Jiang, Tianyi Chen, Hengshun Zhang, Yuxia Zhang, Nan Niu, Hui Liu*. An Empirical Study on Common Sense-Violating Bugs in Mobile Apps. ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology. 2024. CCF-A

[3]. Tianyi Chen, Yanjie Jiang, Fu Fan, Bo Liu, Hui Liu*. A Position-Aware Approach to Decomposing God Classes. IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering. 2024: 1-13. CCF-A

[4]. Yanjie Jiang, Hui Liu*, Jinyan Liu, Yuxia Zhang, Weixing Ji, Hao Zhong, and Lu Zhang. An Empirical Study on the Relationship Between Defects and Source Code's Unnaturalness. ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (TOSEM). 2025, http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/3718083. CCF-A

[5]. Haris Ali Khan, Yanjie Jiang*, Qasim Umer, Yuxia Zhang, Waseem Akram, and Hui Liu*. Has My Code Been Stolen for Model Training? A Naturalness Based Approach to Code Contamination Detection.  ACM International Conference on the Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE2025), DOI:10.1145/3715765, 2025.  CCF-A

[6].  Chunhao Dong, Yanjie Jiang, Yuxia Zhang, Yang Zhang, and Hui Liu*. ChatGPT-Based Test Generation for Refactoring Engines Enhanced by Feature Analysis on Examples. IEEE/ACM International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE), 2025. CCF-A

[7].  Yanjie Jiang, Xiaye Chi, Yuxia Zhang, Weixing Ji, Guangjie Li, Weixiao Wang, Yunni Xia, Lu Zhang, Hui Liu*. Automated Recommendation of Extracting Local Variable Refactorings. ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (TOSEM). 2025, https://doi.org/10.1145/3715110. CCF-A

[8].  Waseem Akram, Yanjie Jiang*, Yuxia Zhang, Haris Ali Khan, and Hui Liu*. LLM-based Method Name Suggestion with Automatically Generated Context-Rich Prompts. The ACM International Conference on the Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE). 2025，https://doi.org/10.1145/3715753. CCF-A

[9].  Bo Liu, Hui Liu*, Nan Niu, Yuxia Zhang, Guangjie Li, He Jiang, and Yanjie Jiang*. An Automated Approach to Discovering Software Refactorings by Comparing Successive Versions. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering (IEEE TSE) 2025, https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10855639, to appear. CCF-A

[10]. Yanjie Jiang, Hui Liu*, Cheung Shing-Chi, Zhang Lu. Shortening Overlong Method Names with Abbreviations. ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (TOSEM). 2024, 33(8): 1-24. CCF-A

[11]. Meng Fan, Yuxia Zhang, Klaas-Jan Stol, Hui Liu. Core Developer Turnover in the Rust Package Ecosystem:               Prevalence, Impact, and Awareness, ACM International Conference on the Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE2025)

[12]. Mian Qin, Yuxia Zhang, Klaas-Jan Stol, Hui Liu. Who Will Stop Contributing to OSS Projects? Predicting Company Turnover Based on Initial Behavior. ACM International Conference on the Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE2025)

[13]. Mian Qin, Yuxia Zhang, Klaas-Jan Stol, Hui Li. Developers’ Views on Commercial Involvement in OSS - A Survey from Three Projects, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering (to appear)

[14]. Tianyang Liu, Weixing Ji, Xiaohui Dong, Wuhuang Yao, Yizhuo Wang, Hui Liu, Haiyang Peng, Yuxuan Wang. JLeaks: A Featured Resource Leak Repository Collected From Hundreds of Open-Source Java Projects. ICSE 2024: 140:1-140:13

[15]. Fang Liu, Zhiyi Fu, Ge Li, Zhi Jin, Hui Liu, Yiyang Hao, and Li Zhang. 2024. Non-Autoregressive Line-Level Code Completion. ACM Trans. Softw. Eng. Methodol. 33, 5, Article 120 (June 2024), 34 pages.

[16]. Yuxia Zhang, Zhiqing Qiu, Klaas-Jan Stol, Wenhui Zhu, Jiaxin Zhu, Yingchen Tian, and Hui Liu*. Automatic Commit Message Generation: A Critical Review and Directions for Future Work, in IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, vol. 50, no. 4, pp. 816-835, April 2024

[17]. Tianyang Liu, Weixing Ji, Xiaohui Dong, Wuhuang Yao, Yizhuo Wang, Hui Liu, Haiyang Peng, and Yuxuan Wang. 2024. JLeaks: A Featured Resource Leak Repository Collected From Hundreds of Open-Source Java Projects. In Proceedings of the IEEE/ACM 46th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE '24). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 140, 1–13.

[18]. Yuxia Zhang, Mian Qin, Klaas-Jan Stol, Minghui Zhou, and Hui Liu*. 2024. How Are Paid and Volunteer Open Source Developers Different? A Study of the Rust Project. In Proceedings of the IEEE/ACM 46th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE '24). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 195, 1–13.

[19]. Chunhao Dong, Yanjie Jiang, Nan Niu, Yuxia Zhang, and Hui Liu*. 2024. Context-Aware Name Recommendation for Field Renaming. In Proceedings of the IEEE/ACM 46th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE '24). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 235, 1–13.

[20]. Leping Li, Hui Liu*, Kejun Li, Yanjie Jiang, and Rui Sun. Generating Concise Patches for Newly Released Programming Assignments, in IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, vol.49, no. 1, pp. 450-467,1 Jan.2023.

[21]. Yanjie Jiang, Hui Liu*, Xiaoqing Luo, Zhihao Zhu, Xiaye Chi, Nan Niu, Yuxia Zhang, Yamin Hu, Pan Bian, and Lu Zhang.  BugBuilder: An Automated Approach to Building Bug Repository, in IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, vol. 49, no. 4, pp. 1443-1463, 1 April 2023

[22]. Bo Liu, Hui Liu*, Nan Niu, Yuxia Zhang, Guangjie Li, and Yanjie Jiang. Automated Software Entity Matching Between Successive Versions. In 2023 38th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE ’23), 11-15 September 2023, Kirchberg, Luxembourg, pp. 1615-1627.

[23]. Xiaye Chi, Hui Liu*, Guangjie Li, Weixiao Wang, Yunni Xia, Yanjie Jiang, Yuxia Zhang, and Weixing Ji. An Automated Approach to Extracting Local Variables. In Proceedings of the 31st ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (ESEC/FSE ’23), 3-9 December 2023, San Francisco, California, United States, pp. 313-325. ACM Distinguished Paper Award!

[24]. Bo Liu, Hui Liu*, Guangjie Li, Nan Niu, Zimao Xu, Yifan Wang, Yunni Xia, Yuxia Zhang, and Yanjie Jiang *. Deep Learning Based Feature Envy Detection Boosted by Real-World Examples. In Proceedings of the 31st ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (ESEC/FSE ’23), 3-9 December 2023, San Francisco, California, United States, pp. 908-920.

[25]. Yuxia Zhang*, Hui Liu*, Xin Tan, Minghui Zhou, Zhi Jin, and Jiaxin Zhu. 2022. Turnover of Companies in OpenStack: Prevalence and Rationale. ACM Trans. Softw. Eng. Methodol. 31, 4, Article 75 (October 2022), 24 pages.

[26]. Yanjie Jiang, Hui Liu*, Jiahao Jin, and Lu Zhang. Automated Expansion of Abbreviations Based on Semantic Relation and Transfer Expansion, in IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, vol. 48, no. 2, pp. 519-537, 1 Feb. 2022

[27]. Lin Jiang, Hui Liu*, He Jiang, Lu Zhang, and Hong Mei. Heuristic and Neural Network Based Prediction of Project-Specific API Member Access, in IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, vol. 48, no. 4, pp. 1249-1267, 1 April 2022

[28]. Hui Liu*, Mingzhu Shen, Jiaqi Zhu, Nan Niu, Ge Li, and Lu Zhang. Deep Learning Based Program Generation From Requirements Text: Are We There Yet?, in IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, vol. 48, no. 4, pp. 1268-1289, 1 April 2022

[29]. Yingchen Tian, Yuxia Zhang*, Klaas-Jan Stol, Lin Jiang, and Hui Liu*. 2022. What Makes a Good Commit Message? In Proceedings of the 44th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE '22). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 2389–2401. ACM Distinguished Paper Award!

[30]. Yuxia Zhang, Klaas-Jan Stol, Hui Liu*, and Minghui Zhou. 2022. Corporate Dominance in Open Source Ecosystems: A Case Study of OpenStack. In Proceedings of the 30th ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (ESEC/FSE 2022). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1048–1060.

[31]. Yanjie Jiang, Hui Liu*, Yuxia Zhang, Weixing Ji, Hao Zhong, and Lu Zhang. 2022. Do Bugs Lead to Unnaturalness of Source Code? In Proceedings of the 30th ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (ESEC/FSE 2022). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1085–1096.

[32]. Hui Liu*, Jiahao Jin, Zhifeng Xu, Yanzhen Zou, Yifan Bu, and Lu Zhang, Deep Learning Based Code Smell Detection, in IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering (IEEE TSE), vol. 47, no. 09, pp. 1811-1837, 2021.

[33]. Yanjie Jiang, Hui Liu*, Nan Niu, Lu Zhang, Yamin Hu. Extracting Concise Bug-Fixing Patches from Human-Written Patches in Version Control Systems. The 43rd International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE), pp. 686-698, 2021.

[34]. Zedong Peng, Prachi Rathod, Nan Niu, Tanmay Bhowmik, Hui Liu, Lin Shi, and Zhi Jin. Environment-Driven Abstraction Identification for Requirements-Based Testing. IEEE 29th International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE2021), pp. 245-256 BEST PAPER AWARD!

[35]. Yanjie Jiang, Hui Liu*, Yuxia Zhang, Nan Niu, Yuhai Zhao, Lu Zhang. Which Abbreviations Should Be Expanded? The ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (ESEC/FSE), pp.578-589, 2021.

[36]. Yangjie Jiang, Hui Liu*, Jiaqi Zhu and Lu Zhang, Automatic and Accurate Expansion of Abbreviations in Parameters. in IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering (IEEE TSE), vol. 46, no. 7, pp. 732-747, 1 July 2020.

[37]. Hui Liu*, Mingzhu Shen, Jiahao Jin, and Yanjie Jiang. 2020. Automated Classification of Actions in Bug Reports of Mobile Apps. In Proceedings of the 29th ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis (ISSTA 2020). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 128–140.

[38]. Lin Jiang, Hui Liu*, and He Jiang, Machine Learning Based Recommendation of Method Names: How Far are We, 34th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE), San Diego, CA, USA, 2019, pp. 602-614

[39]. Yanjie Jiang, Hui Liu*, and Lu Zhang. 2019. Semantic Relation based Expansion of Abbreviations. In Proceedings of the 27th ACM Joint Meeting on European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (ESEC/FSE 2019). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 131-141.

[40]. Hui Liu*; Zhifeng Xu; Yanzhen Zou, Deep Learning Based Feature Envy Detection, 33rd IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE), Montpellier, France, 2018, pp. 385-396.

[41]. Hui Liu*, Qiurong Liu, Zhendong Niu, Yang Liu. Dynamic and Automatic Feedback-Based Threshold Adaptation for Code Smells Detection, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering (IEEE TSE), vol.42, no.6, pp.544-558, 2016.

[42]. Hui Liu*, Qiurong Liu, Cristian-Alexandru Staicu, Michael Pradel, Yue Luo. Nomen est Omen: Exploring and Exploiting Similarities between Argument and Parameter Names. The 38th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE), 1063-1073，May 14 - 22, 2016, Austin, TX, USA.

[43]. Hui Liu*, Qiurong Liu, Yang Liu, Zhouding Wang, Identifying Renaming Opportunities by Expanding Conducted Rename Refactorings, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering (IEEE TSE), vol.41, no.9, pp.887-900, Sept. 1 2015.

[44]. Hui Liu*, Xue Guo, and Weizhong Shao, Monitor-based Instant Software Refactoring, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering (IEEE TSE), Volume 39, No. 8, pp. 1112-1126, Aug., 2013

[45]. Hui Liu*, Zhiyi Ma, Weizhong Shao, and Zhendong Niu, Schedule of Bad Smell Detection and Resolution: A New Way to Save Effort, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering (IEEE TSE), vol.38, no.1, pp.220-235, Jan.-Feb. 2012

[46]. Hui Liu*, Ge Li, Zhiyi Ma, and Weizhong Shao. 2007. Scheduling of conflicting refactorings to promote quality improvement. In Proceedings of the 22nd IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE '07). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 489–492.