Rohan Padhye
Rohan Padhye's Headshot

Assistant (-> Associate) Professor
Software and Societal Systems Department (S3D)
School of Computer Science
Carnegie Mellon University
5000 Forbes Avenue
Pittsburgh, PA 15213
Office: TCS Hall 325
Email: rohanpadhyebots-gotta-get-smarter-than-this@its-really-not-that-hardcmu.edu
(My name is pronounced "row-hun paa-dhyae")

I am also affiliate faculty at CyLab and a research fellow at Antithesis.

As of April 2026, I am not recruiting any additional students for joining my group in any capacity. I will be on sabattical until 2027.
I apologize in advance if I cannot respond to individual emails about potentially working with me at CMU.

About Me

I research techniques for automatically discovering software bugs. My work spans several areas including software engineering, programming languages, systems, and security. I've published at various venues in these fields including ICSE, ASE, ISSTA, MSR, OOPSLA, SOSP, SoCC, NSDI, and USENIX Security. My main contributions have been in the fields of dynamic program analysis, fuzz testing, and concurrency testing.

At CMU, I lead the Program Analysis, Software Testing, and Applications (PASTA) research group. At Antithesis, I am part of the autonomous search team.

I completed my Ph.D. in Computer Science at UC Berkeley, where I was advised by Koushik Sen. My dissertation investigated techniques for specializing program analysis and automated testing tools using artifacts that incorporate the knowledge of domain experts. I've also worked with Amazon Web Services as a visiting academic in the database systems research group, with Microsoft Research as a research intern in the cloud systems group, with Samsung Research America as a security engineering intern in the KNOX group, and I spent two years at IBM Research India in the developer productivity group. I hold a Master's degree from IIT Bombay, where I did a thesis on static program analysis. I am also the lead designer of the ChocoPy programming language, which is used to teach the undergraduate compilers courses at UC Berkeley (and several other universities across the world).

My academic ancestors include Newton, Galelio, Kepler, and Copernicus.

News

Projects

Publications

  • On the Freshness of Pinned Dependencies in Maven
    Vasudev Vikram, Yuvraj Agarwal, Rohan Padhye
    ICST 2026 (Accepted)
  • Feedback-Guided Adaptive Testing of Distributed Systems Designs
    artifacts-available artifacts-functional

    Ao Li, Ankush Desai, and Rohan Padhye
    NSDI 2026 (Publication | Paper PDF)
  • Fray: An Efficient General-Purpose Concurrency Testing Platform for the JVM
    artifacts-available artifacts-reusable artifacts-reproduced

    Ao Li, Byeongjee Kang, Vasudev Vikram, Isabella Laybourn, Samvid Dharanikota, Shrey Tiwari, Rohan Padhye
    OOPSLA 2025 (DOI | Paper PDF | GitHub | Talk Video)
  • The Havoc Paradox in Generator-Based Fuzzing
    Ao Li*, Madonna Huang*, Vasudev Vikram*, Caroline Lemieux, and Rohan Padhye
    ACM TOSEM [* = equal contribution] (DOI | Paper PDF | RCR Report)
  • It's About Time: An Empirical Study of Date and Time Bugs in Open-Source Python Software
    Shrey Tiwari, Serena Chen*, Alexander Joukov*, Peter Vandervelde*, Ao Li, Rohan Padhye
    MSR 2025 (DOI | Paper PDF) [* = equal contribution] ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award
  • SPIDER: Fuzzing for Stateful Performance Issues in the ONOS Software-Defined Network Controller
    Ao Li, Rohan Padhye, Vyas Sekar
    ICST 2025 (DOI | Paper PDF)
  • The Havoc Paradox in Generator-Based Fuzzing (Registered Report)
    Ao Li, Madonna Huang, Caroline Lemieux, and Rohan Padhye
    FUZZING 2024 (DOI | Paper PDF)
  • Software Engineering Methods For AI-Driven Deductive Legal Reasoning
    Rohan Padhye
    SPLASH Onward! 2024 (DOI | Paper PDF | Talk Video)
  • ExChain: Exception Dependency Analysis for Root Cause Diagnosis
    Ao Li, Shan Lu, Suman Nath, Rohan Padhye, Vyas Sekar
    NSDI 2024 (Publication | Paper PDF | GitHub)
  • Can Large Language Models Write Good Property-Based Tests? (Arxiv | Online playground)
    Vasudev Vikram, Caroline Lemieux, Joshua Sunshine, Rohan Padhye
  • Guiding Greybox Fuzzing with Mutation Testing
    artifacts-available artifacts-functional

    Vasudev Vikram, Isabella Laybourn, Ao Li, Nicole Nair, Kelton OBrien, Rafaello Sanna, Rohan Padhye
    ISSTA 2023 (DOI Link | Paper PDF | GitHub) ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award
  • Fuzzing, Symbolic Execution, and Expert Guidance for Better Testing
    Ismet Burak Kadron, Yannic Noller, Rohan Padhye, Tevfik Bultan, Corina S. Păsăreanu, Koushik Sen
    IEEE Software (DOI Link)
  • Distributed Execution Indexing (Arxiv)
    Christopher S. Meiklejohn, Rohan Padhye, Heather Miller
  • On the Naturalness of Fuzzer-Generated Code
    Rajeswari Hita Kambhamettu*, John R Billos*, Tomi Oluwaseun-Apo*, Benjamin Gafford, Rohan Padhye, Vincent J Hellendoorn
    MSR 2022 (DOI Link | Paper PDF) [* = equal contribution]
  • Service-Level Fault Injection Testing
    Christopher S. Meiklejohn, Andrea Estrada, Yiwen Song, Heather Miller, Rohan Padhye
    SoCC 2021 (DOI Link | Paper PDF | Talk Video | Project Website)
  • Growing a Test Corpus with Bonsai Fuzzing
    Vasudev Vikram, Rohan Padhye, Koushik Sen
    ICSE 2021 (DOI Link | Paper PDF | GitHub)
  • BigFuzz: Efficient Fuzz Testing for Data Analytics using Framework Abstraction
    Qian Zhang, Jiyuan Wang, Muhammad Ali Gulzar, Rohan Padhye, Miryung Kim
    ASE 2020 (DOI Link | Paper PDF | GitHub | ICSE'21 Tool Paper)
  • artifacts-available artifacts-reusable
    Quickly Generating Diverse Valid Test Inputs with Reinforcement Learning
    Sameer Reddy, Caroline Lemieux, Rohan Padhye, Koushik Sen
    ICSE 2020 (DOI Link | Paper PDF | Talk Video | GitHub)
  • PARTEMU: Enabling Dynamic Analysis of Real-World TrustZone Software Using Emulation
    Lee Harrison, Hayawardh Vjayakumar, Rohan Padhye, Koushik Sen, and Michael Grace
    USENIX Security 2020 (Paper PDF | Talk Video)
  • artifacts-available artifacts-functional
    Efficient and Scalable Thread-Safety-Violation Detection --- Finding thousands of concurrency bugs during testing
    Guangpu Li, Shan Lu, Madanlal Musuvathi, Suman Nath, and Rohan Padhye
    SOSP 2019 (DOI Link | Paper PDF | Talk Video | GitHub) Best Paper Award
  • SAFFRON: Adaptive Grammar-based Fuzzing for Worst-Case Analysis
    Xuan Bach D. Le, Corina Pasareanu, Rohan Padhye, David Lo, Willem Visser, and Koushik Sen
    JPF 2019 (DOI Link)
  • ChocoPy: A Programming Language for Compilers Courses
    Rohan Padhye, Koushik Sen, and Paul N. Hilfinger
    SPLASH-E 2019 (DOI Link | Paper PDF | Slides PDF)
  • Efficient Fail-Fast Dynamic Subtype Checking
    Rohan Padhye and Koushik Sen
    VMIL 2019 (DOI Link | Paper PDF | Slides PDF)
  • artifacts-available artifacts-functional
    FuzzFactory: Domain-Specific Fuzzing with Waypoints
    Rohan Padhye, Caroline Lemieux, Koushik Sen, Laurent Simon, and Hayawardh Vijayakumar
    OOPSLA 2019 (DOI Link | Paper PDF | Slides PDF | Talk Video | GitHub)
  • artifacts-available artifacts-functional artifacts-reusable
    Semantic Fuzzing with Zest
    Rohan Padhye, Caroline Lemieux, Koushik Sen, Mike Papadakis, and Yves Le Traon
    ISSTA 2019 (DOI Link | Paper PDF | Slides PDF | GitHub) ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Artifact Award
  • JQF: Coverage-Guided Property-Based Testing in Java
    Rohan Padhye, Caroline Lemieux, and Koushik Sen
    ISSTA 2019 Tool (DOI Link | Paper PDF | Talk Video) ACM SIGSOFT Tool Demonstration Award
  • Validity Fuzzing and Parametric Generators for Effective Random Testing
    Rohan Padhye, Caroline Lemieux, Koushik Sen, Mike Papadakis, and Yves Le Traon
    ICSE 2019 Poster (Abstract DOI Link | Poster)
  • PerfFuzz: Automatically Generating Pathological Inputs
    Caroline Lemieux, Rohan Padhye, Koushik Sen, and Dawn Song
    ISSTA 2018 (DOI Link | Paper PDF) ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award
  • Travioli: A Dynamic Analysis for Detecting Data-Structure Traversals
    Rohan Padhye and Koushik Sen
    ICSE 2017 (DOI Link | Paper PDF)
  • Mining API Expertise Profiles with Partial Program Analysis
    Senthil Mani, Rohan Padhye, and Vibha Singhal Sinha
    ISEC 2016 (DOI Link | Paper PDF)
  • Detecting and Mitigating Secret-Key Leaks in Source Code Repositories
    Vibha Singhal Sinha, Diptikalyan Saha, Pankaj Dhoolia, Rohan Padhye, and Senthil Mani
    MSR 2015 (DOI Link)
  • The Synergy Between Voting and Acceptance of Answers on StackOverflow, or the Lack Thereof
    Neelamadhav Gantayat, Pankaj Dhoolia, Rohan Padhye, Senthil Mani, and Vibha Singhal Sinha
    MSR 2015 (DOI Link)
  • Smart Programming Playgrounds
    Rohan Padhye, Pankaj Dhoolia, Senthil Mani, and Vibha Singhal Sinha
    ICSE-NIER 2015 (DOI Link | Paper PDF)
  • NeedFeed: Taming Change Notifications by Modeling Code Relevance
    Rohan Padhye, Senthil Mani, and Vibha Singhal Sinha
    ASE 2014 (DOI Link | Paper PDF)
  • A Study of External Community Contribution to Open-Source Projects on GitHub
    Rohan Padhye, Senthil Mani, and Vibha Singhal Sinha
    MSR 2014 (DOI Link | Paper PDF) Honorable Mention in the MSR Hall of Fame
  • API as a Social Glue
    Rohan Padhye, Debdoot Mukherjee, and Vibha Singhal Sinha
    ICSE-NIER 2014 (DOI Link | Paper PDF) Award for Innovation and Potential Impact
  • Interprocedural Data Flow Analysis in Soot using Value Contexts
    Rohan Padhye and Uday P. Khedker
    SOAP 2013 (DOI Link | Paper PDF)

Dissertations

Service

Organizing

Conferences PCs

Journals

Other

Teaching

CMU:

UC Berkeley: (Graduate student instructor; OGSI)

IIT Bombay: (Teaching assistant)

  • Spring 2013—CS316: Implementation of Programming Languages (with Uday Khedker)
  • Fall 2012—CS699: Software Lab (with Supratim Biswas)
  • Spring 2012—CS152: Abstractions and Paradigms of Programming (with Amitabha Sanyal)

Research Group

I lead the PASTA Lab, which conducts research on Program Analysis, Software Testing, and Applications.

Academic Genealogy

Thanks to the MGP, I've discovered two very exciting lines in my academic ancestry! Here is a visualization that I made, complete with era-appropriate flags:

Bug Trophy Case

Here are some issues in open-source software that were discovered using tools that I developed:

Performance Bugs

Memory-Safety Bugs

Correctness Bugs