Aaron Imani

Hey! I’m a Ph.D. student in Software Engineering at UC Irvine 🇺🇸, where I work with Prof. Iftekhar Ahmed in the STAIRS Lab. My research dives into understanding the underlying mechanisms of Large Language Models for code intelligence through the lens of mechanistic interpretability 🤖💭. Prior to this, I completed my Master’s in Software Engineering at the University of Calgary 🇨🇦.

Curious about what I’ve been working on? Feel free to check out my CV using the button below! You can also find a list of my peer-reviewed publications here.

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Selected Publications

ICSE

Inside Out: Uncovering How Comment Internalization Steers LLMs for Better or Worse

Aaron Imani , Mohammad Moshirpour, and Iftekhar Ahmed

In 2026 IEEE/ACM 48th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE), 2026

arXiv Code
ICSE

Context Conquers Parameters: Outperforming Proprietary Llm in Commit Message Generation

Aaron Imani , Iftekhar Ahmed, and Mohammad Moshirpour

In 2025 IEEE/ACM 47th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE), 2025

DOI arXiv PDF Video Code

MSR

Prompting in the Wild: An Empirical Study of Prompt Evolution in Software Repositories

Mahan Tafreshipour, Aaron Imani , Eric Huang, and 3 more authors

In 2025 IEEE/ACM 22nd International Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR), 2025

DOI arXiv Bib PDF

@inproceedings{tafreshipour2025prompting,
  author = {Tafreshipour, Mahan and Imani, Aaron and Huang, Eric and Almeida, Eduardo Santana de and Zimmermann, Thomas and Ahmed, Iftekhar},
  booktitle = {2025 IEEE/ACM 22nd International Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR)},
  title = {Prompting in the Wild: An Empirical Study of Prompt Evolution in Software Repositories},
  year = {2025},
  volume = {},
  number = {},
  pages = {686-698},
  keywords = {Systematics;Large language models;Documentation;Software;Software reliability;Prompt engineering;Data mining;Software development management;Testing;Software engineering;Large Language Models;Prompt Engineering;Empirical Software Engineering},
  doi = {10.1109/MSR66628.2025.00106},
}