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Main Authors: Xiang, Jianhang, Gao, Zhipeng, Bao, Lingfeng, Hu, Xing, Chen, Jiayuan, Xia, Xin
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.15270
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author Xiang, Jianhang
Gao, Zhipeng
Bao, Lingfeng
Hu, Xing
Chen, Jiayuan
Xia, Xin
author_facet Xiang, Jianhang
Gao, Zhipeng
Bao, Lingfeng
Hu, Xing
Chen, Jiayuan
Xia, Xin
contents Recently, smart contracts have played a vital role in automatic financial and business transactions. To help end users without programming background to better understand the logic of smart contracts, previous studies have proposed models for automatically translating smart contract source code into their corresponding code summaries. However, in practice, only 13% of smart contracts deployed on the Ethereum blockchain are associated with source code. The practical usage of these existing tools is significantly restricted. Considering that bytecode is always necessary when deploying smart contracts, in this paper, we first introduce the task of automatically generating smart contract code summaries from bytecode. We propose a novel approach, named SmartBT (Smart contract Bytecode Translator) for automatically translating smart contract bytecode into fine-grained natural language description directly. Two key challenges are posed for this task: structural code logic hidden in bytecode and the huge semantic gap between bytecode and natural language descriptions. To address the first challenge, we transform bytecode into CFG (Control-Flow Graph) to learn code structural and logic details. Regarding the second challenge, we introduce an information retrieval component to fetch similar comments for filling the semantic gap. Then the structural input and semantic input are used to build an attentional sequence-to-sequence neural network model. The copy mechanism is employed to copy rare words directly from similar comments and the coverage mechanism is employed to eliminate repetitive outputs. The automatic evaluation results show that SmartBT outperforms a set of baselines by a large margin, and the human evaluation results show the effectiveness and potential of SmartBT in producing meaningful and accurate comments for smart contract code from bytecode directly.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_15270
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Automating Comment Generation for Smart Contract from Bytecode
Xiang, Jianhang
Gao, Zhipeng
Bao, Lingfeng
Hu, Xing
Chen, Jiayuan
Xia, Xin
Software Engineering
Recently, smart contracts have played a vital role in automatic financial and business transactions. To help end users without programming background to better understand the logic of smart contracts, previous studies have proposed models for automatically translating smart contract source code into their corresponding code summaries. However, in practice, only 13% of smart contracts deployed on the Ethereum blockchain are associated with source code. The practical usage of these existing tools is significantly restricted. Considering that bytecode is always necessary when deploying smart contracts, in this paper, we first introduce the task of automatically generating smart contract code summaries from bytecode. We propose a novel approach, named SmartBT (Smart contract Bytecode Translator) for automatically translating smart contract bytecode into fine-grained natural language description directly. Two key challenges are posed for this task: structural code logic hidden in bytecode and the huge semantic gap between bytecode and natural language descriptions. To address the first challenge, we transform bytecode into CFG (Control-Flow Graph) to learn code structural and logic details. Regarding the second challenge, we introduce an information retrieval component to fetch similar comments for filling the semantic gap. Then the structural input and semantic input are used to build an attentional sequence-to-sequence neural network model. The copy mechanism is employed to copy rare words directly from similar comments and the coverage mechanism is employed to eliminate repetitive outputs. The automatic evaluation results show that SmartBT outperforms a set of baselines by a large margin, and the human evaluation results show the effectiveness and potential of SmartBT in producing meaningful and accurate comments for smart contract code from bytecode directly.
title Automating Comment Generation for Smart Contract from Bytecode
topic Software Engineering
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.15270