I am a fourth-year Ph.D. student in the Security and Privacy group at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, co-advised by Prof. Varun Chandrasekaran and Prof. Kirill Levchenko. My research focuses on program translation and software security, with an emphasis on machine learning for code. I am currently developing techniques for verified C-to-Rust translation and analyzing the security implications of AI-generated code.

Before joining UIUC, I received M.S. degree in Computer Engineering from University of California, San Diego, and my B.Eng. degree in Software Engineering from Xi’an Jiaotong University.

You can find my CV here.

Publications

• Verifier-Guided Code Translation via Meta-Step Decoding
  Tianyang Zhou, Somesh Jha, Mihai Christodorescu, Kirill Levchenko, and Varun Chandrasekaran. Under review at NeurIPS, 2026.
• LLM-Based Code Translation Needs Formal Compositional Reasoning
  Divyam Anshumaan, Tej Chajed, Varun Chandrasekaran, Alvin Cheung, Sarthak Choudhary, Adwait Godbole, Somesh Jha, Nils Palumbo, Elizabeth Polgreen, Sanjit A. Seshia, Tianyang Zhou. Pre-print, 2025. Authors listed in alphabetical order.
• SoK: Understanding (New) Security Issues Across AI4Code Use Cases
  Qilong Wu*, Taoran Li*, Tianyang Zhou*, and Varun Chandrasekaran. Under review, 2025. *Equal Contribution
• SACTOR: LLM-Driven Correct and Idiomatic C to Rust Translation with Static Analysis and FFI-Based Verification
  Tianyang Zhou, Ziyi Zhang, Haowen Lin, Somesh Jha, Mihai Christodorescu, Kirill Levchenko, and Varun Chandrasekaran. The 64nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 2026
• Fine-grained Library Sandboxing for Rust Ecosystem
  Tianyang Zhou. Master’s Thesis, University of California, San Diego, 2023

Talks

• SACTOR: LLM-Driven Multi-Step Translation from C to Rust using Static Analysis
  Invited Talk at Google, May 2025

Teaching

• UIUC CS 421: Programming Languages (Summer 2025), Teaching Assistant
• UIUC CS 461/ECE 422: Computer Security I (Spring 2025), Teaching Assistant
• UIUC CS 461/ECE 422: Computer Security I (Fall 2024), Teaching Assistant