Portrait of Yangruibo (Robin) Ding

Yangruibo (Robin) Ding

Assistant Professor
Department of Computer Science
University of California, Los Angeles

Engineering VI, Room 295B
Los Angeles, CA 90095

My research focuses on large language models and agentic AI for software engineering. I lead the Code Intelligence (COIN) Lab at UCLA, where we focus on advancing artificial intelligence with code. I am also part of Pasta Lab, a joint research initiative that brings together expertise in PL/SE, AI, and security to build trustworthy and secure software.

I received my Ph.D. from Columbia University (check this video for my doctoral research). Previously, I also had lots of fun training code LLMs and developing coding agents at Google DeepMind, AWS Agentic AI, and T. J. Watson Lab.

Prospective Students: I am always looking for brilliant students to join my lab. If you are interested in working with me, drop me an email with (1) your CV and (2) a brief introduction of your research interests and background.

News

  1. We released "The Next Agentic Cybersecurity Challenge" to evaluate frontier models on binary analysis and reverse engineering. Check our benchmark on Vals AI!

  2. I joined the Department of Computer Science at UCLA as an Assistant Professor.

  3. OpenSage, our ADK that empowers coding agents to self-evolve and self-improve, was accepted to ICML 2026. Our agent, SageAgent, achieved the top-1 resolved rates in CyberGym and Terminal-Bench (in Feb 2026)!

  4. I joined AWS Agentic AI to develop the spec-driven coding agent, Kiro.

Recent Projects Full paper list
The Next Challenge for Agentic Cybersecurity: A Realistic, Contamination-Free Reverse Engineering Benchmark
Jeremy Spence, Nicholas Assaderaghi, Jinhao Zhu, Nikil Ravi, Raluca Ada Popa, Guannan Wei, Yangruibo Ding, Zhuo Zhang
Preprint
SWE-Spot: Building Small Repo-Experts with Repository-Centric Learning
Jinjun Peng, Magnus Saebo, Tianjun Zhong, Yi-Jie Cheng, Junfeng Yang, Baishakhi Ray, Simin Chen, Yangruibo Ding
Preprint
Position: To Defend Against Cyber Attacks, We Must Teach AI Agents to Hack
Terry Yue Zhuo, Yangruibo Ding, Wenbo Guo, Ruijie Meng
ICML 2026
OpenSage: Self-programming Agent Generation Engine
Hongwei Li, Zhun Wang, Qinrun Dai, Yuzhou Nie, Jinjun Peng, Ruitong Liu, Jingyang Zhang, Kaijie Zhu, Jingxuan He, Lun Wang, Yangruibo Ding, Yueqi Chen, Wenbo Guo, Dawn Song
ICML 2026
SageAgent ranked 1st (Feb 2026) in CyberGym and Terminal-Bench
DevOps-Gym: Benchmarking AI Agents in Software DevOps Cycle
Yuheng Tang, Kaijie Zhu, Bonan Ruan, Chuqi Zhang, Michael Yang, Hongwei Li, Suyue Guo, Tianneng Shi, Zekun Li, Christopher Kruegel, Giovanni Vigna, Dawn Song, William Yang Wang, Lun Wang, Yangruibo Ding, Zhenkai Liang, Wenbo Guo
ICLR 2026
Co-PatcheR: Collaborative Software Patching with Component(s)-specific Small Reasoning Models
Yuheng Tang, Hongwei Li, Kaijie Zhu, Michael Yang, Yangruibo Ding, Wenbo Guo
NeurIPS 2025
Vulnerability Detection with Code Language Models: How Far Are We?
Yangruibo Ding, Yanjun Fu, Omniyyah Ibrahim, Chawin Sitawarin, Xinyun Chen, Basel Alomair,
David Wagner, Baishakhi Ray, Yizheng Chen
ICSE 2025
Adopted by Gemini-1.5 and Qwen3-Coder-Next
SemCoder: Training Code Language Models with Comprehensive Semantics Reasoning
Yangruibo Ding, Jinjun Peng, Marcus J. Min, Gail Kaiser, Junfeng Yang, Baishakhi Ray
NeurIPS 2024
TRACED: Execution-aware Pre-training for Source Code
Yangruibo Ding, Ben Steenhoek, Kexin Pei, Gail Kaiser, Wei Le, Baishakhi Ray
ICSE 2024
CrossCodeEval: A Diverse and Multilingual Benchmark for Cross-File Code Completion
Yangruibo Ding*, Zijian Wang*, Wasi Uddin Ahmad*, Hantian Ding, Ming Tan, Nihal Jain, Murali Krishna Ramanathan, Ramesh Nallapati, Parminder Bhatia, Dan Roth, Bing Xiang (* equal contribution)
NeurIPS 2023 (Datasets & Benchmarks)
Adopted by DeepSeek-Coder, Qwen2.5-Coder, StarCoder, and Augment Code

Honors and Awards

  • IBM Ph.D. Fellowship Award. 2022-2024
  • ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award. 2023
  • IEEE TSE Best Paper Award Runner-up. 2022
  • Ph.D. Service Award, Columbia CS. 2025
  • NSF Travel Award. 2022, 2023
  • ACM SIGSOFT CAPS Travel Grant. 2023

Academic Services

Chair / Co-Chair

Program Committee

Conference Reviewer

Journal Reviewer

Invited Talks

  • Dec. 2025: "Towards Autonomous Software Engineering: From Language Models to Agentic Systems" @ Cornell, UT Austin.
  • Feb. - Apr. 2025: "From Code Generation Towards Software Engineering: Advancing Code Intelligence w/ Language Models" @ UW,  UMD,  CMU,  UCLA,  UTD,  JHU,  Georgia Tech,  Stony Brook,  Dartmouth,  NUS.
  • Oct. 2024: "Training Code Language Models with Comprehensive Semantics Reasoning" @ UIUC.
  • Oct. 2024: "Semantic-aware Source Code Modeling" @ UMD, NCSU, ASE'24.
  • Aug. 2024: "Training Code Language Models with Comprehensive Semantics Reasoning" @ Google DeepMind.
  • Apr. 2024: "Vulnerability Detection with Code Language Models: How Far Are We?" @ Columbia SSS Seminar.

Industry Experiences

  • Sep 2025 - June 2026: Postdoctoral Research Scientist @ AWS Agentic AI - Kiro Science.
  • May 2024 - Dec 2024: Student Researcher @ Google DeepMind - Learning4Code.
  • May 2022 - Sep 2022: Applied Scientist Intern @ AWS AI Labs - Code Whisperer/Amazon Q.
  • May 2021 - Sep 2021 & June 2020 - Aug 2020: Research Intern @ IBM T. J. Watson Lab - AI for Code.

Last Updated: Aug 2026.

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