Xiao Cheng is a lecturer (~U.S.Assistant Professor) at School of Computing, Faculty of Science and Engineering, Macquarie University. He was a Post-Doctoral Researcher at School of Computer Science and Engineering, University of New South Wales (UNSW), working with Scientia Associate Professor Yulei Sui. His papers have been published in top-tier conferences and journals in the field of software engineering (TOSEM, FSE, ICSE, ISSTA), programming languages (OOPSLA) and security (TDSC), and awarded ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award for FSE 2024 and ACM SIGPLAN Distinguished Paper Award for OOPSLA 2020. He is one of the major contributors of the SVF project and the author of the DeepWukong project. He has served as the web chair of LCTES 2024 and is serving or has served as PC member for FSE 2026, ISSRE 2025, PAKDD 2025, FSE 2025 (SRC), ISSRE 2024 (DS track), and artifact evaluation committee members for ICSE 2025, ISSTA 2024/2023, SAS 2023 and FormaliSE 2025/2024/2023.

His research lies at the intersection of Programming Languages (PL) and Software Engineering (SE), focusing on enhancing the security and reliability of modern software systems through software analysis and verification techniques, including abstract interpretation, typestate analysis, IFDS, and sparse value-flow analysis. He is also exploring the integration of artificial intelligence, such as graph neural networks, language models and uncertainty quantification, with classical PL/SE tasks to further enhance these domains.