Jinsheng Ba

Jinsheng Ba is an incoming Assistant Professor in the School of Data Science at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen. His research interests span Software Engineering and LLM, with a specific focus on observing, manipulating, and shaping software behaviors at a semantic level to enhance the reliability and correctness of critical data- and AI-driven systems. All of his research has been published in top-tier venues, including ICSE, SIGMOD, and Usenix Security. As the first author, he is the recipient of two ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Awards at ICSE 2023 and ASE 2022 and was nominated for the Best Ph.D. Thesis Award. His research led to the discovery of over 200 previously unknown bugs and vulnerabilities in widely used fundamental software systems. Prior to joining CUHK-Shenzhen, he was a postdoctoral researcher at ETH Zurich, advised by Prof. Zhendong Su. He received his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from National University of Singapore in 2024, advised by Dr. Manuel Rigger.

Recruiting: I have multiple openings for PhD, MPhil, and RA students starting Spring/Fall 2027. If you are interested in software engineering, software security, AI4SE, self-evolving systems, and LLM Agents, please visit our Join Us page for more information.

News

Jun 25, 2026	Two papers accepted at ISSTA’26 for solving software specification challenges!
May 11, 2026	I will serve as a Program Committee member for ASE’26, FSE’27, and OOPSLA’27.
Jun 22, 2025	My PhD thesis was awarded `PhD Thesis Award-Honorable Mention` from NUS School of Computing!
Mar 31, 2025	Our paper `Towards a Unified Query Plan Representation` was accepted at ICDE’25!
Jan 31, 2025	Our paper `Finding Logic Bugs in Graph-processing Systems via Graph-cutting` was accepted at SIGMOD’25!
Oct 4, 2024	I gave a talk to Languages, Systems, and Data (LSD) Lab at UC Santa Cruz.
Jul 18, 2024	I successfully defended my PhD thesis and will join ETH Zurich as a postdoc researcher! 🎉🎓
Mar 14, 2024	Our paper `Keep It Simple: Testing Databases via Differential Query Plans` was accepted at SIGMOD’24!
Jan 12, 2024	I was invited to serve on the Program Committee for DBTEST’24 Workshop co-loated with SIGMOD’24.
Jan 8, 2024	Our work `Testing Database Engines via Query Plan Guidance` received research hightlight from NUS School of Computing!

Selected Publications

SIGMOD

Keep It Simple: Testing Databases via Differential Query Plans

Jinsheng, Ba, and Manuel, Rigger

Proceeding of ACM Management of Data (SIGMOD’24) Jun 2024

Bib PDF Video Code Poster Slides

@article{dqp,
  author = {Ba, Jinsheng and Rigger, Manuel},
  title = {Keep It Simple: Testing Databases via Differential Query Plans},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3654991},
  doi = {10.1145/3654991},
  year = {2024},
  month = jun,
  issue_date = {June 2024},
  publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
  journal = {Proceeding of ACM Management of Data (SIGMOD'24)},
}

ICSE

CERT: Finding Performance Issues in Database Systems Through the Lens of Cardinality Estimation

Jinsheng, Ba, and Manuel, Rigger

In The 46th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE’24) Apr 2024

arXiv Bib PDF Code

@inproceedings{cert,
  author = {Ba, Jinsheng and Rigger, Manuel},
  title = {CERT: Finding Performance Issues in Database Systems Through the Lens of Cardinality Estimation},
  booktitle = {The 46th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE'24)},
  year = {2024},
  month = apr,
  url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3597503.3639076},
  doi = {10.1145/3597503.3639076},
}

ICSE

Testing Database Engines via Query Plan Guidance

Jinsheng, Ba, and Manuel, Rigger

In The 45th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE’23) May 2023

🏆ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award🏆

🗣️Featured in NUS News🗣️

arXiv Bib PDF Code Slides

@inproceedings{qpg,
  author = {Ba, Jinsheng and Rigger, Manuel},
  title = {Testing Database Engines via Query Plan Guidance},
  booktitle = {The 45th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE'23)},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSE48619.2023.00174},
  doi = {10.1109/ICSE48619.2023.00174},
  year = {2023},
  month = may,
}

ASE

Efficient Greybox Fuzzing to Detect Memory Errors

Jinsheng, Ba, Gregory J, Duck, and Abhik, Roychoudhury

In The 37th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE’22) Oct 2022

🏆ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award🏆

arXiv Bib PDF Video Code Slides

@inproceedings{rezzan,
  author = {Ba, Jinsheng and Duck, Gregory J and Roychoudhury, Abhik},
  title = {Efficient Greybox Fuzzing to Detect Memory Errors},
  booktitle = {The 37th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE'22)},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3551349.3561161},
  doi = {10.1145/3551349.3561161},
  year = {2022},
  month = oct,
  numpages = {14},
}

USENIX SEC

Stateful Greybox Fuzzing

Jinsheng, Ba, Marcel, Böhme, Zahra, Mirzamomen, and Abhik, Roychoudhury

In 31st USENIX Security Symposium (SEC’22) Aug 2022

arXiv Bib PDF Video Code Slides

@inproceedings{sgfuzz,
  author = {Ba, Jinsheng and B{\"o}hme, Marcel and Mirzamomen, Zahra and Roychoudhury, Abhik},
  title = {Stateful Greybox Fuzzing},
  booktitle = {31st USENIX Security Symposium (SEC'22)},
  year = {2022},
  isbn = {978-1-939133-31-1},
  address = {Boston, MA},
  pages = {3255--3272},
  url = {https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity22/presentation/ba},
  publisher = {USENIX Association},
  month = aug
}