Bowen Xu
Assistant ProfessorSoftMax Lab
Software Engineering Group at NCSU
Department of Computer Science
College of Engineering
Office: Engineering Building II (EB2), Room 3228
Email: bxu22@ncsu.edu
Research Focus
My research lies at the intersection of software engineering, machine learning, and program analysis, with a central goal of building trustworthy AI software systems. I organize my work around the following pillars of trustworthy AI:- Security: attacks and defenses on AI models and AI-enabled systems
- Backdoor Attack and Defense on Code Models [ TSE-24] [ ICSME-26]
- Backdoor Attack in Reinforcement Learning Systems [S&P-24]
- Adversarial Policies [ ACSAC-22]
- AI for Vulnerability Detection and Repair [TSE-23] [ICSE-24] [AIWare-24]
- Privacy: understanding and mitigating data leakage in code models
- Membership Inference on LLMs for Code [ICSE-26] [TOSEM-26]
- Privacy Risk of Model Compression [AIware-25]
- Robustness: assessing whether AI behaves consistently and correctly
- Robustness Evaluation of LLMs for Programming [TOSEM-26] [TOSEM-26]
- Generalization on Long-tailed Code Data [ASE-23] [InteNSE-23]
- Correctness Assessment of AI-generated Patches [TSE-24]
- Safety: finding and preventing failures in AI-enabled software systems
- Safety Violation Identification of AI-Enabled Control Systems [TOSEM-25]
- Testing AI-Enabled Systems [ICSE-24] [TOSEM-24]
- Self-Healing and Maintenance of Robotic and Software Systems [CACM-26] [Forge-26]
- Efficiency: making AI for code lightweight and green
- Model Compression and Quantization [ASE-22] [ICSME-25]
- Green AI for Code [ICSE-SEIS-24]
- Human-Centered AI: how developers and users work with, and are served by, AI
- Developer-AI Interaction and Collaboration [ ICPC-26] [FSE-26]
- Inclusiveness in User Feedback [TOSEM-26]
- Trust in Generative AI for Software Q&A [ASE-23]
Bio
Dr. Bowen Xu is a (tenure-track) Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at North Carolina State University (NC State). He received his PhD degree from School of Computing and Information Systems (SCIS) at Singapore Management University (SMU). His research interests lie primarily in the fields of machine learning and software engineering. Recently, he has focused on securing AI models for various software engineering tasks. His works won several research paper awards, such as the IEEE TCSE Distinguished Paper Award at ICSME 2026, the ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award at ICPC 2026, the Best Paper Award of the year 2024 at IEEE TSE, the Honorable Mention Award at ACSAC 2022, the Highly Commended Full Paper Award at ESEM 2018, nominated for ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award at ASE 2022. He co-organized two FSE workshops SEA4DQ in 2024 and MaLTeS in 2022. He served as associate editor for EMSE. He is also invited to be a PC and referee for many top-tier conferences and Journals, such as ICSE, FSE, ASE, TSE, TOSEM, EMSE, etc. Contact him at: bxu22@ncsu.edu. More info at: https://www.bowenxu.me.
