13.3CRSep 9, 2024
Ethereum Fraud Detection via Joint Transaction Language Model and Graph Representation LearningJianguo Sun, Yifan Jia, Yanbin Wang et al.
Ethereum faces growing fraud threats. Current fraud detection methods, whether employing graph neural networks or sequence models, fail to consider the semantic information and similarity patterns within transactions. Moreover, these approaches do not leverage the potential synergistic benefits of combining both types of models. To address these challenges, we propose TLMG4Eth that combines a transaction language model with graph-based methods to capture semantic, similarity, and structural features of transaction data in Ethereum. We first propose a transaction language model that converts numerical transaction data into meaningful transaction sentences, enabling the model to learn explicit transaction semantics. Then, we propose a transaction attribute similarity graph to learn transaction similarity information, enabling us to capture intuitive insights into transaction anomalies. Additionally, we construct an account interaction graph to capture the structural information of the account transaction network. We employ a deep multi-head attention network to fuse transaction semantic and similarity embeddings, and ultimately propose a joint training approach for the multi-head attention network and the account interaction graph to obtain the synergistic benefits of both.
5.1CRApr 7
ExDoS: Expert-Guided Dual-Focus Cross-Modal Distillation for Smart Contract Vulnerability DetectionYe Tian, Yifan Jia, Yanbin Wang et al.
The success of smart contracts has made them a target for attacks, but their closed-source nature often forces vulnerability detection to work on bytecode, which is inherently more challenging than source-code-based analysis. While recent studies try to align source and bytecode embeddings during training to transfer knowledge, current methods rely on graph-level alignment that obscures fine-grained structural and semantic correlations between the two modalities. Moreover, the absence of precise vulnerability patterns and granular annotations in bytecode leads to depriving the model of crucial supervisory signals for learning discriminant features. We propose ExDoS to transfer rich semantic knowledge from source code to bytecode, effectively supplementing the source code prior in practical settings. Specifically, we construct semantic graphs from source code and control-flow graphs from bytecode. To address obscured local signals in graph-level contract embeddings, we propose a Dual-Attention Graph Network introducing a novel node attention aggregation module to enhance local pattern capture in graph embeddings. Furthermore, by summarizing existing source-code vulnerability patterns and designing corresponding bytecode-level patterns for the three target vulnerabilities, we provide an aligned pattern framework that facilitates fine-grained cross-modal alignment and the capture of function-level vulnerability signals. Finally, we propose a dual-focus objective for our cross-modal distillation framework, comprising: a Global Semantic Distillation Loss for transferring graph-level knowledge and a Local Semantic Distillation Loss enabling expert-guided, fine-grained vulnerability-specific distillation. Experiments on real-world contracts demonstrate that our method achieves consistent F1-score improvements (3%--6%) over strong baselines.
Continuous Multi-Task Pre-training for Malicious URL Detection and Webpage ClassificationYujie Li, Yiwei Liu, Peiyue Li et al.
Malicious URL detection and webpage classification are critical tasks in cybersecurity and information management. In recent years, extensive research has explored using BERT or similar language models to replace traditional machine learning methods for detecting malicious URLs and classifying webpages. While previous studies show promising results, they often apply existing language models to these tasks without accounting for the inherent differences in domain data (e.g., URLs being loosely structured and semantically sparse compared to text), leaving room for performance improvement. Furthermore, current approaches focus on single tasks and have not been tested in multi-task scenarios. To address these challenges, we propose urlBERT, a pre-trained URL encoder leveraging Transformer to encode foundational knowledge from billions of unlabeled URLs. To achieve it, we propose to use 5 unsupervised pretraining tasks to capture multi-level information of URL lexical, syntax, and semantics, and generate contrastive and adversarial representations. Furthermore, to avoid inter-pre-training competition and interference, we proposed a grouped sequential learning method to ensure effective training across multi-tasks. Finally, we leverage a two-stage fine-tuning approach to improve the training stability and efficiency of the task model. To assess the multitasking potential of urlBERT, we fine-tune the task model in both single-task and multi-task modes. The former creates a classification model for a single task, while the latter builds a classification model capable of handling multiple tasks. We evaluate urlBERT on three downstream tasks: phishing URL detection, advertising URL detection, and webpage classification. The results demonstrate that urlBERT outperforms standard pre-trained models, and its multi-task mode is capable of addressing the real-world demands of multitasking.
Dynamic Feature Fusion: Combining Global Graph Structures and Local Semantics for Blockchain Fraud DetectionZhang Sheng, Liangliang Song, Yanbin Wang
The advent of blockchain technology has facilitated the widespread adoption of smart contracts in the financial sector. However, current fraud detection methodologies exhibit limitations in capturing both global structural patterns within transaction networks and local semantic relationships embedded in transaction data. Most existing models focus on either structural information or semantic features individually, leading to suboptimal performance in detecting complex fraud patterns.In this paper, we propose a dynamic feature fusion model that combines graph-based representation learning and semantic feature extraction for blockchain fraud detection. Specifically, we construct global graph representations to model account relationships and extract local contextual features from transaction data. A dynamic multimodal fusion mechanism is introduced to adaptively integrate these features, enabling the model to capture both structural and semantic fraud patterns effectively. We further develop a comprehensive data processing pipeline, including graph construction, temporal feature enhancement, and text preprocessing. Experimental results on large-scale real-world blockchain datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms existing benchmarks across accuracy, F1 score, and recall metrics. This work highlights the importance of integrating structural relationships and semantic similarities for robust fraud detection and offers a scalable solution for securing blockchain systems.