Shuai Shao

Yingxuan Yang, Huacan Chai, Shuai Shao et al.

The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) has enabled the development of multi-agent systems where multiple LLM-based agents collaborate on complex tasks. However, existing systems often rely on centralized coordination, leading to scalability bottlenecks, reduced adaptability, and single points of failure. Privacy and proprietary knowledge concerns further hinder cross-organizational collaboration, resulting in siloed expertise. We propose AgentNet, a decentralized, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)-based framework that enables LLM-based agents to specialize, evolve, and collaborate autonomously in a dynamically structured Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG). Unlike prior approaches with static roles or centralized control, AgentNet allows agents to adjust connectivity and route tasks based on local expertise and context. AgentNet introduces three key innovations: (1) a fully decentralized coordination mechanism that eliminates the need for a central orchestrator, enhancing robustness and emergent intelligence; (2) dynamic agent graph topology that adapts in real time to task demands, ensuring scalability and resilience; and (3) a retrieval-based memory system for agents that supports continual skill refinement and specialization. By minimizing centralized control and data exchange, AgentNet enables fault-tolerant, privacy-preserving collaboration across organizations. Experiments show that AgentNet achieves higher task accuracy than both single-agent and centralized multi-agent baselines.

Shihao Xia, Shuai Shao, Mengting He et al.

To govern smart contracts running on Ethereum, multiple Ethereum Request for Comment (ERC) standards have been developed, each containing a set of rules to guide the behaviors of smart contracts. Violating the ERC rules could cause serious security issues and financial loss, signifying the importance of verifying smart contracts follow ERCs. Today's practices of such verification are to either manually audit each single contract or use expert-developed, limited-scope program-analysis tools, both of which are far from being effective in identifying ERC rule violations. This paper presents a tool named AuditGPT that leverages large language models (LLMs) to automatically and comprehensively verify ERC rules against smart contracts. To build AuditGPT, we first conduct an empirical study on 222 ERC rules specified in four popular ERCs to understand their content, their security impacts, their specification in natural language, and their implementation in Solidity. Guided by the study, we construct AuditGPT by separating the large, complex auditing process into small, manageable tasks and design prompts specialized for each ERC rule type to enhance LLMs' auditing performance. In the evaluation, AuditGPT successfully pinpoints 418 ERC rule violations and only reports 18 false positives, showcasing its effectiveness and accuracy. Moreover, AuditGPT beats an auditing service provided by security experts in effectiveness, accuracy, and cost, demonstrating its advancement over state-of-the-art smart-contract auditing practices.

Shihao Xia, Mengting He, Shuai Shao et al.

To govern smart contracts running on Ethereum, multiple Ethereum Request for Comment (ERC) standards have been developed, each having a set of rules to guide the behaviors of smart contracts. Violating the ERC rules could cause serious security issues and financial loss, signifying the importance of verifying smart contracts follow ERCs. Today's practices of such verification are to manually audit each single contract, use expert-developed program-analysis tools, or use large language models (LLMs), all of which are far from effective in identifying ERC rule violations. This paper introduces SymGPT, a tool that combines the natural language understanding of large language models (LLMs) with the formal guarantees of symbolic execution to automatically verify smart contracts' compliance with ERC rules. To develop SymGPT, we conduct an empirical study of 132 ERC rules from three widely used ERC standards, examining their content, security implications, and natural language descriptions. Based on this study, we design SymGPT by first instructing an LLM to translate ERC rules into a defined EBNF grammar. We then synthesize constraints from the formalized rules to represent scenarios where violations may occur and use symbolic execution to detect them. Our evaluation shows that SymGPT identifies 5,783 ERC rule violations in 4,000 real-world contracts, including 1,375 violations with clear attack paths for stealing financial assets, demonstrating its effectiveness. Furthermore, SymGPT outperforms six automated techniques and a security-expert auditing service, underscoring its superiority over current smart contract analysis methods.