I am a second year PhD student at Software and Societal Systems Department, School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University, co-advised by Christian Kästner and Chris Timperley. I work on safety/security for software with ML/LLM-Agent components, and AI for software safety/security.

Before joining CMU, I received my B.Eng. in Computer Science and B.Ec. in Economics and Finance at Tsinghua University, where I was fortunate to be advised by Prof. Maosong Sun and Prof. Junliang Xing.

I also undertook a summer research internship at CMU’s Software and Societal Systems Department, co-advised by Prof. Christian Kästner and Prof. Sherry Tongshuang Wu.

Publications

Yining Hong, Yining She, Eunsuk Kang, Christopher S. Timperley, Christian Kästner. Symbolic Guardrails for Domain-Specific Agents: Stronger Safety and Security Guarantees Without Sacrificing Utility. arXiv preprint, April 2026. [arXiv] [.pdf]

Aarya Doshi, Yining Hong, Congying Xu, Eunsuk Kang, Alexandros Kapravelos, Christian Kästner. Towards Verifiably Safe Tool Use for LLM Agents. Accepted at International Conference on Software Engineering: New Ideas and Emerging Results (ICSE-NIER), April 2026. [.pdf]

Yining Hong, Christopher S. Timperley, Christian Kästner. From Hazard Identification to Controller Design: Proactive and LLM-Supported Safety Engineering for ML-Powered Systems. In Proceedings of the International Conference on AI Engineering - Software Engineering for AI (CAIN), April 2025. [.pdf]

Chenyang Yang, Yining Hong, Grace Lewis, Tongshuang Wu, and Christian Kästner. What Is Wrong with My Model? Identifying Systematic Problems with Semantic Data Slicing. In Proceedings of the 39th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE), Los Alamitos, CA: IEEE Computer Society, November 2024. [.pdf]

Yining Hong, Fanchao Qi, Maosong Sun. Two Heads Are Better Than One: Exploiting Both Sequence and Graph Models in AMR-To-Text Generation. [.pdf]

Teaching Experience

I was a volunteer teaching assistant at the Center for Student Learning and Development at Tsinghua University. I offered drop-in tutoring for computer science and finance courses.