CV

Seeking a postdoctoral position starting in late 2027. CV (PDF) · junda.zhao (at) mail.utoronto.ca

Education

PhD candidate in Mechanical and Industrial Engineering, University of Toronto, 2022 to present
- Passed the doctoral qualifying examination; expected completion in 2027
- Dissertation (in progress): Accurate Specification Recovery for Effective Test Generation
- Advisor: Prof. Eldan Cohen, Optimization and Machine Learning (OptiMaL) Lab
- Close collaboration with Prof. Shurui Zhou (Electrical & Computer Engineering)
Honours Bachelor of Science in Computer Science, University of Toronto, 2021

Awards

ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award, ISSTA 2026, for Do Coverage and Mutation Scores of LLM-Generated Test Suites Correlate with Their Effectiveness? (Replicability Study)
Ontario Graduate Scholarship (OGS), 2024 to 2025

Publications

Do Coverage and Mutation Scores of LLM-Generated Test Suites Correlate with Their Effectiveness? (Replicability Study)

Junda Zhao, Shurui Zhou, and Eldan Cohen. "Do Coverage and Mutation Scores of LLM-Generated Test Suites Correlate with Their Effectiveness? (Replicability Study)." ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis (ISSTA 2026). ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award.

Evaluating and Mitigating the Misguidance Effect of Buggy Code in LLM-Generated Unit Tests

Junda Zhao, Shurui Zhou, and Eldan Cohen. "Evaluating and Mitigating the Misguidance Effect of Buggy Code in LLM-Generated Unit Tests." ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis (ISSTA 2026).

Variational Prefix Tuning for Diverse and Accurate Code Summarization Using Pre-trained Language Models

Junda Zhao, Yuliang Song, and Eldan Cohen. "Variational Prefix Tuning for Diverse and Accurate Code Summarization Using Pre-trained Language Models." Journal of Systems and Software, Volume 229, November 2025.

Transformer Models for Mining Intents and Predicting Activities from Emails in Knowledge-Intensive Processes

Faria Khandaker, Arik Senderovich, Junda Zhao, Eldan Cohen, Eric Yu, Sebastian Carbajales, and Allen Chan. "Transformer Models for Mining Intents and Predicting Activities from Emails in Knowledge-Intensive Processes." Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence, Volume 128, February 2024.

A New Fuzzy Belonging-based Multi-view K-means Clustering Algorithm

Junda Zhao, Weiling Cai, Yizhen Ge, and Lijuan Zhang. "A New Fuzzy Belonging-based Multi-view K-means Clustering Algorithm." IEEE 10th Annual Information Technology, Electronics and Mobile Communication Conference (IEMCON 2019).

Accurate Specification Recovery for Effective Test Generation

Junda Zhao. "Accurate Specification Recovery for Effective Test Generation." SPLASH/ISSTA 2026 Doctoral Symposium.

Research experience

2022 to present: PhD candidate, OptiMaL Lab, University of Toronto
- Reliable testing and verification for AI coding agents, with a focus on LLM-based unit test generation
- Specification-based testing: recovering the intended behavior of code that may be buggy, and generating tests from it
- Evaluation of LLM-generated tests and of the metrics used to judge them
- Improving the reliability of testing and verification when people work with AI-assisted development tools
- Code summarization with pre-trained language models of code
2021 to 2022: Research Assistant, Dynamic Graphics Project (DGP) Lab, University of Toronto
- Geometric stylization and feature-grid based texture synthesis and transfer
Undergraduate projects with Prof. Alec Jacobson (geometry processing) and Prof. David Levin (physics-based animation)

Teaching

Teaching Assistant, MIE1517: Introduction to Deep Learning (graduate course), University of Toronto, Winter 2024, and Fall and Winter terms since Fall 2024
Teaching Assistant, MIE370: Introduction to Machine Learning (undergraduate course), University of Toronto, Fall 2025
Teaching Assistant, MIE350: Design and Analysis of Information Systems (undergraduate course), University of Toronto, Fall 2022

Professional experience

2019 to 2020: Junior Identity and Access Management Analyst, Information Technology Services, University of Toronto
- Built and maintained a database system for tracking, parsing, and analyzing network access and activity information for students, faculty, and staff

Junda Zhao

CV