Jocelyn Qiaochu Chen

Email: qc1127 [at] cs.nyu.edu | Office: 60 5th Ave, Room 418 | Twitter | Google Scholar | ORCID

I am currently a Faculty Fellow/Assistant Professor at NYU Courant. I am also an incoming Assistant Professor (starting July 2026) at the University of Alberta and an Amii fellow. I obtained my PhD at the University of Texas at Austin with Isil Dillig and Greg Durrett. Prior to that, I did my Bachelor at the Univeristy of Wisconsin - Madison. My research areas include programming languages, formal methods, and natural language processing. More specifically, I do research on program synthesis and neurosymbolic programming.

I am recruiting MS/PhD students at the University of Alberta to join the PEAR 🍐 (Program Synthesis and Reasoning) group.
I am open to working with (undergrad/grad) research interns if there is a strong match.

Please take a look at my research interests below and Notes to Prospective Students if any of these questions interests you as well.

Research Interests

My current research interests revolve around the following key questions in AI-assisted programming:

• How can we leverage state-of-the-art machine learning models to create new programming abstractions? How can we leverage symbolic and neural techniques to synthesize programs in a correct, scalable, user-friendly way?

• What are the right abstractions for programming tasks involving Large Language Model (LLM) invocations?

• How can we effectively integrate programming interfaces with program synthesizers?

Preprints & Publications

[ *: equal contribution.]

• FlexSQL: Flexible Exploration and Execution Make Better Text-to-SQL Agents. Quang Hieu Pham, Yang He, Ping Nie, Canwen Xu, Davood Rafiei, Yuepeng Wang, Xi Ye*, Jocelyn Chen*. arXiv:2605.02815.Code
• Detecting and Suppressing Reward Hacking with Gradient Fingerprints. Songtao Wang, Quang Hieu Pham, Fangcong Yin, Xinpeng Wang, Jocelyn Chen, Greg Durrett, Xi Ye. arXiv:2604.16242.Code
• VeriSoftBench: Repository-Scale Formal Verification Benchmarks for Lean. Maxine Xin*, Jocelyn Chen*, Greg Durrett, Isil Dillig. arXiv:2602.18307.Website
• CRUST-Bench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for C-to-safe-Rust Transpilation. Anirudh Khatry, Robert Zhang, Jia Pan, Ziteng Wang, Jocelyn Chen, Greg Durrett, Isil Dillig. COLM 2025.
• Automated Discovery of Tactic Libraries for Interactive Theorem Proving. Maxine Xin, Jimmy Xin, Gabriel Poesia, Noah Goodman, Jocelyn Chen, Isil Dillig. OOPSLA 2025.
• Active Learning for Neurosymbolic Program Synthesis. Celeste Barnaby, Jocelyn Chen, Ramya Ramanlingam, Osbert Bastani, Isil Dillig. OOPSLA 2025.
• PhotoScout: Synthesis-Powered Multi-Modal Image Search. Celeste Barnaby, Jocelyn Chen, Chenglong Wang, Isil Dillig. CHI 2024.
• Satisfiability-Aided Language Models Using Declarative Prompting. Xi Ye, Jocelyn Chen, Isil Dillig, Greg Durrett. Neurips 2023. Code
• Data Extraction via Semantic Regular Expression Synthesis. Jocelyn Chen, Arko Banerjee, Çağatay Demiralp, Greg Durrett, Isil Dillig. OOPSLA 2023. Code
• ImageEye: Batch Image Processing Using Program Synthesis. Celeste Barnaby, Jocelyn Chen, Roopsha Samanta, Isil Dillig. PLDI 2023. Code
• Type-Directed Synthesis of Visualizations from Natural Language Queries. Jocelyn Chen, Shankara Pailoor, Celeste Barnaby, Abby Criswell, Chenglong Wang, Greg Durrett, Isil Dillig. OOPSLA 2022. Code
• Optimal Neural Program Synthesis from Multimodal Specifications. Xi Ye, Jocelyn Chen, Isil Dillig, Greg Durrett. Findings of EMNLP 2021.Code
• Web Question Answering with Neurosymbolic Program Synthesis. Jocelyn Chen, Aaron Lamoreaux, Xinyu Wang, Greg Durrett, Osbert Bastani, Isil Dillig. PLDI 2021. Code.Presentation
• Sketch-driven Regular Expression Generation from Natural Language and Examples. Xi Ye, Jocelyn Chen, Xinyu Wang, Isil Dillig, Greg Durrett. TACL 2020. Code
• Benchmarking Multimodal Regex Synthesis with Complex Structures. Xi Ye, Jocelyn Chen, Isil Dillig, Greg Durrett. ACL 2020. Code
• Multi-modal Synthesis of Regular Expressions. Jocelyn Chen, Xinyu Wang, Xi Ye, Greg Durrett, Isil Dillig. PLDI 2020. Code.Presentation

Teaching

I am NOT looking for graders/tutors/teaching assistants for my courses.

• Fall 2025: CSCI-UA.0202(-003): Operating Systems
• Spring 2025: CSCI-UA.0202(-003): Operating Systems
• Fall 2024: CSCI-UA.0202(-003): Operating Systems

Service

• Program Committee: CAV (25), ICSE (26,27), ISSTA (26), OOPSLA (26), PLDI (26), NeuS (26)
• Organization: PLDI (25,26 as web co-chair)
• Review: ICML (26), COLM (26), VerifAI Workshop (@ICLR 25, @ICML 26), LMPL Workshop (@SPLASH 2025)
• Speaker: UCRL@ICLR 26 (invited talk)
• Mentorship: SIGPLAN-M (since 2022)

Students

• Avani Tiwari
(MS, co-supervising with Levi Lelis)
• Haozhi Wang
(MS, started Fall 2025)
• Quang Hieu Pham
(MS, co-supervising with Xi Ye)

Notes to Prospective Students

Research Scope: My research is grounded in programming languages, formal methods, and program synthesis. I do use LLMs and machine learning extensively, but my core interests are in reasoning about software, programs, and logic — LLMs are one of several tools I use, not the primary object of study. I may be less well-suited to advise students whose primary interest is LLMs or NLP research itself.

Preferred Background (any level): I am especially interested in working with students who are clearly self-motivated and have a solid mathematical background. Prior experience with systems programming is a plus. No prior research experience is required.

Prospective MSc/PhD Students: I am recruiting 1-2 fully funded MSc/PhD students in the upcoming cycle. Please note that our MSc program is fully research based and fully funded (same as the first 2 years in a PhD program), and our PhD program is shorter and assumes prior research training. As such, we do not directly admit bachelor students into the PhD program — students typically join via the MSc first. I only take MSc students who are interested in pursuing a PhD degree. Before emailing, please take a look at a few of my recent papers and briefly mention in your email which directions interest you and why. Please email me at jocelyn.chen@ualberta.ca and include "Prospective Student" in the email subject line.

Undergrad Students at U Alberta and (Remote) Interns: Please fill out this Google Form.

(Due to large number of inquiries, I am not able to respond to all requests.)

Personal

I am originally from Nanjing, China. I go by Jocelyn, though my publications appear under Qiaochu Chen (written as 陈翘楚 in Chinese).