Zhezhen (Justin) Cao | North Carolina State University

About Me

I am a Ph.D. student in Computer Science at North Carolina State University, advised by Prof. Bowen Xu. Before joining NC State I received my B.Eng. in Computer Science and Technology from the Southern University of Science and Technology (SUSTech), where I was advised by Prof. Yepang Liu. I was also fortunate to work with Prof. Lingming Zhang as a research intern at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 2024.

My research is in software engineering, particularly large language models for software engineering. Software security is my current focus, and I work mainly on vulnerability detection.

From high school through my undergraduate years, I was active in competitive programming as a contestant, organizer, and student coach.

Education

Ph.D. in Computer ScienceAug. 2025 – Present

North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC, USA
Advisor: Prof. Bowen Xu

B.Eng. in Computer Science and TechnologySep. 2021 – Jul. 2025

Southern University of Science and Technology (SUSTech), Shenzhen, China
Honored Turing Class
Advisor: Prof. Yepang Liu

News

[Mar. 2026] Our paper AEGIS, on graph-guided reasoning for vulnerability detection, is out on arXiv.
[Aug. 2025] Joined North Carolina State University as a Ph.D. student, advised by Prof. Bowen Xu.
[Jul. 2025] Received my B.Eng. in Computer Science and Technology from Southern University of Science and Technology.

Publications

Preserve the Vulnerability, Break the Alert: Bypassing CodeQL Taint Tracking with Natural Rewrites In Submission

Zhezhen Cao, Bowen Xu

Under submission, 2026.
AEGIS: From Clues to Verdicts — Graph-Guided Deep Vulnerability Reasoning via Dialectics and Meta-Auditing arXiv

Sen Fang, Weiyuan Ding, Zhezhen Cao, Zhou Yang, Bowen Xu

arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.20637, 2026.

PDF Project Page BibTex
Can LLMs Implicitly Learn Numeric Parameter Constraints in Data Science APIs? NeurIPS

Yinlin Deng, Chunqiu Steven Xia, Zhezhen Cao, Meiziniu Li, Lingming Zhang

Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2024.

PDF Project Page BibTex

Honors & Awards

Gold Medal, ICPC Asia East-Continent Final Contest2021

Gold Medal ×4, ICPC Asia Regional Contests2021 – 2022

Silver Medal, National Olympiad in Informatics (NOI)2020

Teaching & Service

Teaching Assistant ×3, NC State — CSC226, CSC316, CSC3262025 – Present

Teaching Assistant ×5, SUSTech — CS110, CS203, CS2082023 – 2025

Student Coach, SUSTech ICPC Team2024 – 2025

Captain, SUSTech ICPC Team2021 – 2022

Chief Referee & Lead Organizer, 5th SUSTech Programming Contest2023