Research

Peer-reviewed publications on AI safety, LLM behaviour, and software reliability.

An Exploratory Study on Fine-Tuning Large Language Models for Secure Code Generation

Empirical Software Engineering, Springer — Vol. 31, Issue 4Empirical Software Engineering · Vol. 31, Issue 4 · 2026

Junjie Li, Fazle Rabbi, Cheng Cheng, Aseem Sangalay, Yuan Tian, Jinqiu Yang

Extended journal study examining whether fine-tuning pre-trained LLMs on vulnerability-fixing commits promotes secure code generation. Applied LoRA and IA3 parameter-efficient fine-tuning on multiple LLMs including CodeLlama across a dataset of 14,622 C/C++ files. Found that larger fine-tuning datasets produce more secure output without degrading correctness — CodeLlama showed a 2% PASS@1 improvement under HumanEval CPP with secure fine-tuning.

LLMSecurityFine-tuningLoRACodeLlama

Fine Tuning Large Language Model for Secure Code Generation

IEEE/ACM FORGE '241st International Conference on AI Foundation Models and Software Engineering · Lisbon, Portugal — pp. 86–90 · 2024

Junjie Li, Aseem Sangalay, Cheng Cheng, Yuan Tian, Jinqiu Yang

Conference paper demonstrating that fine-tuning GPT-J on real-world vulnerability fixes steers LLM code generation away from insecure patterns. Achieved ~10% increase in vulnerability-free C code output, showing targeted fine-tuning on security-relevant data meaningfully shifts model behaviour without sacrificing generation quality.

LLMSecurityCode GenerationGPT-JFine-tuning

Software Defect Prediction Using Abstract Syntax Trees Features and Object-Oriented Metrics

Springer — Reliability Engineering for Industrial ProcessesSpringer Series in Reliability Engineering · pp. 189–201 · 2024

A. Sethi, A. Sangalay, R. Malhotra

Framed software bug prediction as a regression problem and compared LSTM and CNN models trained on Abstract Syntax Tree features and object-oriented code metrics against classical ML baselines. AST-based structural representations outperform flat OO metrics alone for predicting defect-prone modules.

Deep LearningASTDefect PredictionLSTMCNN