Zhenhao Li

Zhenhao Li

Assistant Professor

About Me

I am an Assistant Professor at the School of Information Technology, York University. I completed my Ph.D. at Concordia University in 2022, under the supervision of Dr. Tse-Hsun (Peter) Chen (Concordia University) and Dr. Weiyi (Ian) Shang (University of Waterloo). My research mainly focuses on software engineering, including AIOps, SE for AI, mining software repositories, and empirical software engineering.

Selected Publications

C##: Conference, J##: Journal, P##: Preprint

Ⓔ: Equally contributed

  • C13 Understanding Practitioners’ Expectations on Clear Code Review Comments
    Junkai ChenⒺ, Zhenhao LiⒺ, Qiheng Mao, Xing Hu, Kui Liu, Xin Xia.
    ISSTA’25 The 34th ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis.
    🔗
  • J02 An Empirical Study of Retrieval-Augmented Code Generation: Challenges and Opportunities
    Zezhou Yang, Sirong Chen, Cuiyun Gao, Zhenhao Li, Xing Hu, Kui Liu, Xin Xia.
    TOSEM’25 ACM Transactions in Software Engineering and Methodology, accepted in 2025.
    🔗
  • C12 Benchmarking Open-source Large Language Models For Log Level Suggestion
    Yi Wen Heng, Zeyang Ma, Zhenhao Li, Dong Jae Kim, Tse-Hsun (Peter) Chen.
    ICST’25 The 18th IEEE International Conference on Software Testing, Verification and Validation.
    🔗
  • C11 Reasoning Runtime Behavior of a Program with LLM: How Far Are We?
    Junkai Chen, Zhiyuan Pan, Xing Hu, Zhenhao Li, Ge Li, Xin Xia.
    ICSE’25 The 47th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Software Engineering.
    🔗 📊
  • C10 ThinkRepair: Self-Directed Automated Program Repair
    Xin Yin, Chao Ni, Shaohua Wang, Zhenhao Li, Limin Zeng, Xiaohu Yang.
    ISSTA’24 The 33rd ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis.
    🔗
  • C09 Code Search is All You Need? Improving Code Suggestions with Code Search
    Junkai Chen, Xing Hu, Zhenhao Li, Cuiyun Gao, Xin Xia, David Lo.
    ICSE’24 The 46th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Software Engineering.
    🏅ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award
    🔗
  • P02 Towards Explainable Vulnerability Detection with Large Language Models
    Qiheng MaoⒺ, Zhenhao LiⒺ, Xing Hu, Kui Liu, Xin Xia, Jianling Sun.
    Arxiv’24 Arxiv 2406.09701.
    🔗
  • P01 NLPerturbator: Studying the Robustness of Code LLMs to Natural Language Variations
    Junkai ChenⒺ, Zhenhao LiⒺ, Xing Hu, Xin Xia.
    Arxiv’24 Arxiv 2406.19783.
    🔗
  • C08 Are They All Good? Studying Practitioners’ Expectations on the Readability of Log Messages
    Zhenhao Li, An Ran Chen, Xing Hu, Xin Xia, Tse-Hsun (Peter) Chen, Weiyi Shang.
    ASE’23 The 38th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering.
    🔗
  • C07 Did We Miss Something Important? Studying and Exploring Variable-Aware Log Abstraction
    Zhenhao Li, Chuan Luo, Tse-Hsun (Peter) Chen, Weiyi Shang, Shilin He, Qingwei Lin, Dongmei Zhang.
    ICSE’23 The 45th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Software Engineering.
    🔗
  • J01 Studying Duplicate Logging Statements and Their Relationships with Code Clones
    Zhenhao Li, Tse-Hsun (Peter) Chen, Jinqiu Yang, Weiyi Shang.
    TSE’22 IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, published in 2022.
    🔗
  • C06 DeepLV: Suggesting Log Levels Using Ordinal Based Neural Networks
    Zhenhao Li, Heng Li, Tse-Hsun (Peter) Chen, Weiyi Shang.
    ICSE’21 The 43rd IEEE/ACM International Conference on Software Engineering.
    🔗
  • C05 Where Shall We Log? Studying and Suggesting Logging Locations in Code Blocks
    Zhenhao Li, Tse-Hsun (Peter) Chen, Weiyi Shang.
    ASE’20 The 35th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering.
    🔗
  • C04 Towards Providing Automated Supports to Developers on Writing Logging Statements
    Zhenhao Li.
    ICSE’20 (DS) The 42nd IEEE/ACM International Conference on Software Engineering, Doctoral Symposium.
  • C03 Studying and Suggesting Logging Locations in Code Blocks
    Zhenhao Li.
    ICSE’20 (SRC) The 42nd IEEE/ACM International Conference on Software Engineering, Student Research Competition.
  • C02 Characterizing and Detecting Duplicate Logging Code Smells
    Zhenhao Li.
    ICSE’19 (SRC) The 41st IEEE/ACM International Conference on Software Engineering, Student Research Competition.
  • C01 DLFinder: Characterizing and Detecting Duplicate Logging Code Smells
    Zhenhao Li, Tse-Hsun (Peter) Chen, Jinqiu Yang, Weiyi Shang.
    ICSE’19 The 41st IEEE/ACM International Conference on Software Engineering.
    🔗

Full List (Google Scholar)

Services and Experience

Honors and Awards

  • ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award, The 46th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE’24)
  • Doctoral Research Scholarship, Fonds de recherche du Québec – Nature et technologies (FRQNT)
  • Leonard F. Ruggins Engineering PhD Scholarships, Concordia University
  • Centre for Machine Intelligence Graduate Scholarship, Concordia University
  • ACM SIGSOFT CAPS Award, ACM SIGSOFT
  • Concordia International Tuition Award of Excellence, Concordia University
  • Concordia University Conference and Exposition Award, Concordia University
  • Concordia Merit Scholarship, Concordia University

Education

  • Ph.D. in Computer Science, Concordia University, 2022
  • M.A.Sc. in Software Engineering, Concordia University, 2019
  • B.Eng. in Software Engineering, Harbin Institute of Technology, 2017

Other Information

  • Languages Skills
    • English
    • Chinese (Mandarin)
    • Korean