Curriculum-Guided Reinforcement Learning for Synthesizing Gas-Efficient Financial Derivatives Contracts
This addresses the problem of automating financial derivatives contracts for blockchain developers and users by providing an incremental improvement in gas optimization.
The paper tackles the challenge of generating gas-efficient Solidity smart contracts from high-level financial specifications like the Common Domain Model, achieving up to 35.59% cost reduction compared to unoptimized baselines.
Smart contract-based automation of financial derivatives offers substantial efficiency gains, but its real-world adoption is constrained by the complexity of translating financial specifications into gas-efficient executable code. In particular, generating code that is both functionally correct and economically viable from high-level specifications, such as the Common Domain Model (CDM), remains a significant challenge. This paper introduces a Reinforcement Learning (RL) framework to generate functional and gas-optimized Solidity smart contracts directly from CDM specifications. We employ a Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) agent that learns to select optimal code snippets from a pre-defined library. To manage the complex search space, a two-phase curriculum first trains the agent for functional correctness before shifting its focus to gas optimization. Our empirical results show the RL agent learns to generate contracts with significant gas savings, achieving cost reductions of up to 35.59% on unseen test data compared to unoptimized baselines. This work presents a viable methodology for the automated synthesis of reliable and economically sustainable smart contracts, bridging the gap between high-level financial agreements and efficient on-chain execution.