About Me

I am a Researcher at Huawei. My research interests include, but not limited to, program analysis, system reliability and security, and software performance.
From Jan. 2020 to April 2021, I worked with Prof. Xiangyu Zhang in the Department of Computer Science at Purdue University, as a postdoctoral researcher. I received my Ph.D from the University of Texas at San Antonio, advised by Dr. Tongping Liu in Dec. 2019.

Research

Record and Replay

iReplayer aims to identically replay multithreaded programs in the original process, under the "in-situ" setting. The novel in-situ and identical replay of iReplayer makes it more likely to reproduce errors, and allows it to directly employ debugging mechanisms (e.g. watchpoints) to aid failure diagnosis. iReplayer implements multiple methods to reduce its performance and support identical replay. Currently, iReplayer only incurs around 3% performance overhead, which allows it to be always enabled in the production environment. iReplayer enables a range of possibilities, and this paper presents three examples: two automatic tools for detecting buffer overflows and use-after-free bugs, and one interactive debugging tool that is integrated with GDB.

Publications

OOPSLA 2023
MemPerf: Profiling Allocator-Induced Performance Slowdowns
Jin Zhou, Sam Silvestro, Steven (Jiaxun) Tang, Hanmei Yang, Hongyu Liu, Guangming Zeng, Bo Wu, Cong Liu, and Tongping Liu
Proc. ACM Program. Lang. 7, OOPSLA2, Article 272 (October 2023), 24 pages.
CAIN 2022
Checkpointing and Deterministic Training for Deep Learning
Xiangzhe Xu*, Hongyu Liu*, Guanhong Tao, Zhou Xuan, Xiangyu Zhang. (*equal contribution)
Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on AI Engineering – Software Engineering for AI (CAIN 2022). Pittsburgh, PA, USA.
OOPSLA 2020
WATCHER: In-Situ Failure Diagnosis
Hongyu Liu, Sam Silvestro, Xiangyu Zhang, Jian Huang, and Tongping Liu.
Proc. ACM Program. Lang. 4, OOPSLA, Article 143 (November 2020).
ASE 2020
Prober: Practically Defending Overflows with Page Protection
Hongyu Liu*, Ruiqin Tian*, Bin Ren, and Tongping Liu. (*equal contribution)
In 35th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE ’20), Virtual Event, Australia. ACM, New York, NY, USA.
CGO 2019
CSOD: Context-Sensitive Overflow Detection
Hongyu Liu, Sam Silvestro Xiaoyin Wang, Lide Duan, Tongping Liu.
In Proceedings of the 2019 International Symposium on Code Generation and Optimization (CGO 2019). IEEE Press, Washington DC, USA.
MICRO 2018
Sampler: PMU-based Sampling to Detect Memory Errors Latent in Production Software
Sam Silvestro, Hongyu Liu, Tong Zhang, Changhee Jung, Dongyoon Lee, Tongping Liu.
The 51st Annual IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture (MICRO), Fukuoka, Japan.
Security 2018
Guarder: A Tunable Secure Allocator
Sam Silvestro, Hongyu Liu, Tianyi Liu, Zhiqiang Lin, and Tongping Liu.
In Proceedings of 27th {USENIX} Security Symposium ({USENIX} Security 18. USENIX Association, Baltimore, MD, USA.
PLDI 2018
iReplayer: In-situ and Identical Record-and-Replay for Multithreaded Applications
Hongyu Liu, Sam Silvestro, Wei Wang, Chen Tian, and Tongping Liu.
In Proceedings of 39th ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI’18). ACM, Philadelphia, PA, USA.
CCS 2017
FreeGuard: A Faster Secure Heap Allocator
Sam Silvestro, Hongyu Liu, Corey Crosser, Zhiqiang Lin, and Tongping Liu.
In Proceedings of the 2017 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS'17). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2389-2403.
ASE 2017
UNDEAD: detecting and preventing deadlocks in production software
Jinpeng Zhou, Sam Silvestro, Hongyu Liu, Yan Cai, and Tongping Liu.
In Proceedings of the 32nd IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE 2017). IEEE Press, Piscataway, NJ, USA, 729-740.

Work Experience

  • Research intern @ Alibaba DAMO Academy, Mentored by Dr. Lide Duan

    July 2019 - Dec. 2019, Sunnyvale, California

Services

  • External Review Committee: PPOPP 2022
  • Reviewer: IEEE Access 2020, Transactions on Software Engineering 2021, ACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems 2021
  • Sub-Reviewer: ICPADS 2016
  • EuroSys'20 Shadow PC Member
  • Student Volunteer: RTSS 2015, ICSE 2016, PLDI 2018