Yiming Su
B.Sc. in Computer Science, The University of Chicago.
whoami
I'm a second-year Computer Science PhD at The University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign, advised by Prof. Tianyin Xu.
I work on agentic systems reliabilty: I design system-side frameworks and tooling support to reduce or eliminate the impacts of unreliable agent behaviors.
Research
LLM-powered agents are inherently nondeterministic in their behaviors, preventing us from applying them in safety-critical systems (e.g., large-scale datacenters), where us humans can greatly benefit from their autonomous nature and data-processing capabilities. My research focuses on reducing or elminate the impacts of this unpredictable behavior. The efforts include providing systems-side frameworks that prevent any harmful behaviors, or providing tooling support for the agent at runtime. My research has culminated in Stratus, a multi-agent systems that enables autonomous SRE incident management through a transaction-like semantics, and previously, HotGPT, an attempt to understand the edges and limits of LLMs before time.
Before working on agents, I focused on distributed systems reliability. My research focused on the semantics challenge of managing traditional distributed systems (e.g., Apache Cassandra) on cloud-native platforms (e.g., Kubernetes). Large-scale distributed software have complicated management semantics that are hard to capture in management programs (termed "operators"). We conducted an effort to understand and detect such semantics bug in operator programs, which is accepted into NSDI '26. We found 86 bugs (53 confirmed and 28 fixed) in popular operators of distributed systems.
A short bio can be found here.
Education
- Ph.D. in Computer Science (current student), University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, 2024-?
- B.Sc. in Computer Science, The University of Chicago, 2020-2024
Publications
- Arxiv Preprint
SysMoBench: Evaluating AI on Formally Modeling Complex Real-World Systems [pdf]- Qian Cheng, Ruize Tang, Emilie Ma, Finn Hackett, Peiyang He, Yiming Su, Ivan Beschastnikh, Yu Huang, Xiaoxing Ma, Tianyin Xu
- NeurIPS 2025
STRATUS: A Multi-agent System for Autonomous Reliability Engineering of Modern Clouds. [pdf]- Yinfang Chen*, Jiaqi Pan*, Jackson Clark*, Yiming Su*, Noah Zheutlin, Bhavya Bhavya, Rohan Arora, Yu Deng, Saurabh Jha, Tianyin Xu (*: co-primary authors)
- NSDI '26
Who Watches the Watchers? On the Reliability of Softwarizing Cloud Application Management [pdf]- Jiawei Tyler Gu, Zhen Tang, Yiming Su, Bogdan A. Stoica, Xudong Sun, William X. Zheng, Yue Zhang, Akond Rahman, Chen Wang, and Tianyin Xu
- SOSP '24
If At First You Don’t Succeed, Try, Try, Again...? Insights and LLM-informed Tooling for Detecting Retry Bugs in Software Systems [pdf]- Bogdan Alexandru Stoica*, Utsav Sethi*, Yiming Su, Cyrus Zhou, Shan Lu, Jonathan Mace, Madan Musuvathi, Suman Nath (*: co-primary authors)
- HotOS '23
HotGPT: How to Make Software Documentation More Useful with a Large Language Model? [pdf]- Yiming Su, Chengcheng Wan, Utsav Sethi, Shan Lu, Madan Musuvathi, Suman Nath
Talks
- Co-host, IBM-Illinois Discovery Accelerator Institute Annual Meeting -- Workshop Demo on SRE AI Agent Cloud Incident Mitigation on ITBench. (Apr. 25, 2025)
- Speaker, HotGPT: How to Make Software Documentation More Useful with a Large Language Model? -- HotOS '23. (Me presenting our work)
Services
- OSDI '25 Artifact Evaluation Reviewer
- ATC '25 Artifact Evaluation Reviewer
- Siebel Peer Mentor
News
Random things
Misc. images I collected during PhDMisc. quotes
Number of times this page got falsely marked as deceptive website
Unless specifically noted, I do not own any of the images presented on this site. All rights go to their respective owner.
My past life... here