Boqi (Percy) Chen

PhD Candidate, McGill University

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email: boqi⚫chen@mail⚫mcgill⚫ca

I am a PhD candidate in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ece) at McGill University, supervised by Prof. Daniel Varro and Prof. Gunter Mussbacher. Additionally, I work as an R&D engineer at Aggregate Intellect through a Mitacs grant. My research focuses on applying model-based techniques to enhance the reliability and robustness of machine learning systems. I am also actively involved in projects evaluating the quality and properties of machine learning models for various software engineering tasks, such as model generation, bug detection, and code summarization. With the rapid advancements in large language models, I am exploring their potential in software engineering applications and to further improve their robustness and reliability. Particularly, I am interested in how to use various software engineering techniques for consistent and reliable integration of LLMs in domain-specific applications.

During my PhD, I have been a part-time research associate at Huawei Waterloo Research Center. Besides I’m also an active contributor to the open-source project Sherpa that aims to build a robust and easy-to-use large language model framework.

I also organize a bi-weekly (sometimes weekly) discussion group on graph neural networks and their applications. You can find the scedules here. If you are interested in joining, please subscribe to this calendar. We are also actively looking for new speakers, so if you are interested in presenting your work or any topics you are interested in, please feel free to reach out to me.

news

Jul 04, 2025 Three papers that I’ve contributed to have been accepted to the ACM / IEEE 28th International Conference on Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems (MODELS 2025).
Jun 23, 2025 The paper I’m co-first author of, “LLM-based Satisfiability Checking of String Requirements by Consistent Data and Checker Generation” has been accepted to the 33rd IEEE International Requirements Engineering 2025 conference (RE 2025). Check out the preprint.
May 01, 2025 My ICSE student research competition submission “Consistent Graph Model Generation with Large Language Models” has been honored the third place in the competition!

selected publications

  1. ICSE
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    The Power of Types: Exploring the Impact of Type Checking on Neural Bug Detection in Dynamically Typed Languages
    Boqi Chen, José Antonio Hernández López, Gunter Mussbacher , and 1 more author
    In Proceedings of the 2025 IEEE/ACM 47th International Conference on Software Engineering , 2025
  2. ICSE-SRC
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    Consistent Graph Model Generation with Large Language Models
    Boqi Chen
    In Proceedings of the 2025 IEEE/ACM 47th International Conference on Software Engineering: Companion Proceedings , 2025
  3. MODELS-C
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    Prompting or Fine-tuning? A Comparative Study of Large Language Models for Taxonomy Construction
    Boqi Chen, Fandi Yi, and Dániel Varró
    In 2023 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems Companion (MODELS-C) , 2023