I am a CS Ph.D. student at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, advised by Prof. Lingming Zhang. I am also a research intern at Meta FAIR, working at FAIR CodeGen team.

I focus on building and improving code LLMs and code agents through pre-training, post-training, and test-time scaling. You can find my CV here.

I obtained my bachelor’s degrees at Tsinghua University, including one in Software Engineering from the School of Software and one in Business Administration from the School of Economics and Management. I was a research assistant at Software System Security Assurance Group during my undergraduate years, advised by Prof. Yu Jiang.

Selected Publications (See full list on Google Scholar)

• SWE-Replay: Efficient Test-Time Scaling for Software Engineering Agents
  Yifeng Ding and Lingming Zhang
  arXiv. [preprint]
• Empowering Multi-Turn Tool-Integrated Agentic Reasoning with Group Turn Policy Optimization
  Yifeng Ding, Hung Le, Songyang Han, Kangrui Ruan, Zhenghui Jin, Varun Kumar, Zijian Wang, and Anoop Deoras
  64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
  (ACL 2026), To appear, July 2026. [preprint]
• Planning-Aware Code Infilling via Horizon-Length Prediction
  Yifeng Ding, Hantian Ding, Shiqi Wang, Qing Sun, Varun Kumar, and Zijian Wang
  The 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
  (EMNLP 2025), Pages 32930–32942, November 2025. [paper] [summary]
• XFT: Unlocking the Power of Code Instruction Tuning by Simply Merging Upcycled Mixture-of-Experts
  Yifeng Ding, Jiawei Liu, Yuxiang Wei, and Lingming Zhang
  62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
  (ACL 2024), Pages 12941–12955, August 2024. [paper] [summary] [code]
• SelfCodeAlign: Self-Alignment for Code Generation
  Yuxiang Wei, Federico Cassano, Jiawei Liu, Yifeng Ding, Naman Jain, Zachary Mueller, Harm de Vries, Leandro Von Werra, Arjun Guha, and Lingming Zhang
  Thirty-eighth Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems
  (NeurIPS 2024), Pages 62787–62874, December 2024. [paper] [code] [model] [dataset]
• Magicoder: Empowering Code Generation with OSS-Instruct
  Yuxiang Wei, Zhe Wang, Jiawei Liu, Yifeng Ding, and Lingming Zhang
  Forty-first International Conference on Machine Learning
  (ICML 2024), Pages 52632–52657, July 2024. [paper] [code] [model] [dataset]
• Evaluating Language Models for Efficient Code Generation
  Jiawei Liu, Songrun Xie, Junhao Wang, Yuxiang Wei, Yifeng Ding, and Lingming Zhang
  First Conference on Language Modeling
  (COLM 2024), October 2024. [paper] [code]
• RepoQA: Evaluating Long Context Code Understanding
  Jiawei Liu, Jia Le Tian, Vijay Daita, Yuxiang Wei, Yifeng Ding, Yuhan Katherine Wang, Jun Yang, Lingming Zhang
  First Workshop on Long-Context Foundation Models @ ICML 2024
  (LCFM @ ICML 2024), July 2024. [paper] [code]
• The Plastic Surgery Hypothesis in the Era of Large Language Models
  Chunqiu Steven Xia, Yifeng Ding, and Lingming Zhang
  38th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering
  (ASE 2023), Pages 522–534, September 2023. [paper]

Academic Services

• Reviewer: ICML, NeurIPS, ICLR, ACL/ARR, AAAI, AISTATS, TOSEM (2024 - 2025)
• Organizing Committee: LLM4Code@ICSE’25 (International Workshop on Large Language Models for Code, co-organized with ICSE’25), LLM4Code@ICSE’24

Teaching

• UIUC CS 521: ML and Compilers (2025 Spring) [website]
  with Prof. Sasa Misailovic and Prof. Charith Mendis

Invited Talks

• CAMEL-AI.org (11/2024): “Horizon-Length Prediction: Advancing Fill-in-the-Middle Capabilities for Code Generation with Lookahead Planning”
• UCLA AGI Lab (11/2024): “Improving Code Language Modeling via Horizon-Length Prediction”
• UIUC FM/SE Seminar (10/2024): “Horizon-Length Prediction: Advancing Fill-in-the-Middle Capabilities for Code Generation with Lookahead Planning”
• Amazon Comprehend Team (07/2024): “XFT: Unlocking the Power of Code Instruction Tuning by Simply Merging Upcycled Mixture-of-Experts”
• Uber Programming Systems Team (04/2023): “Equipping Large Language Models with Domain-Specific Knowledge for Automated Program Repair”

Contacts

• Email: yifeng6@illinois.edu
• Address: 2107 Thomas M. Siebel Center for Computer Science