Jiajia Ma

Lei Yu, Shiqi Chen, Hang Yuan et al.

With the rapid development of blockchain technology, smart contract security has become a critical challenge. Existing smart contract vulnerability detection methods face three main issues: (1) Insufficient quality of datasets, lacking detailed explanations and precise vulnerability locations. (2) Limited adaptability of large language models (LLMs) to the smart contract domain, as most LLMs are pre-trained on general text data but minimal smart contract-specific data. (3) Lack of high-quality explanations for detected vulnerabilities, as existing methods focus solely on detection without clear explanations. These limitations hinder detection performance and make it harder for developers to understand and fix vulnerabilities quickly, potentially leading to severe financial losses. To address these problems, we propose Smart-LLaMA, an advanced detection method based on the LLaMA language model. First, we construct a comprehensive dataset covering four vulnerability types with labels, detailed explanations, and precise vulnerability locations. Second, we introduce Smart Contract-Specific Continual Pre-Training, using raw smart contract data to enable the LLM to learn smart contract syntax and semantics, enhancing their domain adaptability. Furthermore, we propose Explanation-Guided Fine-Tuning, which fine-tunes the LLM using paired vulnerable code and explanations, enabling both vulnerability detection and reasoned explanations. We evaluate explanation quality through LLM and human evaluation, focusing on Correctness, Completeness, and Conciseness. Experimental results show that Smart-LLaMA outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, with average improvements of 6.49% in F1 score and 3.78% in accuracy, while providing reliable explanations.

Lei Yu, Jingyuan Zhang, Xin Wang et al.

Smart contracts automate the management of high-value assets, where vulnerabilities can lead to catastrophic financial losses. This challenge is amplified in Large Language Models (LLMs) by two interconnected failures: they operate as unauditable "black boxes" lacking a transparent reasoning process, and consequently, generate code riddled with critical security vulnerabilities. To address both issues, we propose SmartCoder-R1 (based on Qwen2.5-Coder-7B), a novel framework for secure and explainable smart contract generation. It begins with Continual Pre-training (CPT) to specialize the model. We then apply Long Chain-of-Thought Supervised Fine-Tuning (L-CoT SFT) on 7,998 expert-validated reasoning-and-code samples to train the model to emulate human security analysis. Finally, to directly mitigate vulnerabilities, we employ Security-Aware Group Relative Policy Optimization (S-GRPO), a reinforcement learning phase that refines the generation policy by optimizing a weighted reward signal for compilation success, security compliance, and format correctness. Evaluated against 17 baselines on a benchmark of 756 real-world functions, SmartCoder-R1 establishes a new state of the art, achieving top performance across five key metrics: a ComPass of 87.70%, a VulRate of 8.60%, a SafeAval of 80.16%, a FuncRate of 53.84%, and a FullRate of 50.53%. This FullRate marks a 45.79% relative improvement over the strongest baseline, DeepSeek-R1. Crucially, its generated reasoning also excels in human evaluations, achieving high-quality ratings for Functionality (82.7%), Security (85.3%), and Clarity (90.7%).