SAEL: Leveraging Large Language Models with Adaptive Mixture-of-Experts for Smart Contract Vulnerability Detection

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Yu, Lei, Cheng, Shiqi, Huang, Zhirong, Zhang, Jingyuan, Shen, Chenjie, Lu, Junyi, Yang, Li, Zhang, Fengjun, Ma, Jiajia
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Yu, Lei
Cheng, Shiqi
Huang, Zhirong
Zhang, Jingyuan
Shen, Chenjie
Lu, Junyi
Yang, Li
Zhang, Fengjun
Ma, Jiajia
author_facet Yu, Lei
Cheng, Shiqi
Huang, Zhirong
Zhang, Jingyuan
Shen, Chenjie
Lu, Junyi
Yang, Li
Zhang, Fengjun
Ma, Jiajia
contents With the increasing security issues in blockchain, smart contract vulnerability detection has become a research focus. Existing vulnerability detection methods have their limitations: 1) Static analysis methods struggle with complex scenarios. 2) Methods based on specialized pre-trained models perform well on specific datasets but have limited generalization capabilities. In contrast, general-purpose Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate impressive ability in adapting to new vulnerability patterns. However, they often underperform on specific vulnerability types compared to methods based on specialized pre-trained models. We also observe that explanations generated by general-purpose LLMs can provide fine-grained code understanding information, contributing to improved detection performance. Inspired by these observations, we propose SAEL, an LLM-based framework for smart contract vulnerability detection. We first design targeted prompts to guide LLMs in identifying vulnerabilities and generating explanations, which serve as prediction features. Next, we apply prompt-tuning on CodeT5 and T5 to process contract code and explanations, enhancing task-specific performance. To combine the strengths of each approach, we introduce an Adaptive Mixture-of-Experts architecture. This dynamically adjusts feature weights via a Gating Network, which selects relevant features using TopK filtering and Softmax normalization, and incorporates a Multi-Head Self-Attention mechanism to enhance cross-feature relationships. This design enables effective integration of LLM predictions, explanation features, and code features through gradient optimization. The loss function jointly considers both independent feature performance and overall weighted predictions. Experiments show that SAEL outperforms existing methods across various vulnerabilities.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_22371
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle SAEL: Leveraging Large Language Models with Adaptive Mixture-of-Experts for Smart Contract Vulnerability Detection
Yu, Lei
Cheng, Shiqi
Huang, Zhirong
Zhang, Jingyuan
Shen, Chenjie
Lu, Junyi
Yang, Li
Zhang, Fengjun
Ma, Jiajia
Cryptography and Security
Artificial Intelligence
Software Engineering
With the increasing security issues in blockchain, smart contract vulnerability detection has become a research focus. Existing vulnerability detection methods have their limitations: 1) Static analysis methods struggle with complex scenarios. 2) Methods based on specialized pre-trained models perform well on specific datasets but have limited generalization capabilities. In contrast, general-purpose Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate impressive ability in adapting to new vulnerability patterns. However, they often underperform on specific vulnerability types compared to methods based on specialized pre-trained models. We also observe that explanations generated by general-purpose LLMs can provide fine-grained code understanding information, contributing to improved detection performance. Inspired by these observations, we propose SAEL, an LLM-based framework for smart contract vulnerability detection. We first design targeted prompts to guide LLMs in identifying vulnerabilities and generating explanations, which serve as prediction features. Next, we apply prompt-tuning on CodeT5 and T5 to process contract code and explanations, enhancing task-specific performance. To combine the strengths of each approach, we introduce an Adaptive Mixture-of-Experts architecture. This dynamically adjusts feature weights via a Gating Network, which selects relevant features using TopK filtering and Softmax normalization, and incorporates a Multi-Head Self-Attention mechanism to enhance cross-feature relationships. This design enables effective integration of LLM predictions, explanation features, and code features through gradient optimization. The loss function jointly considers both independent feature performance and overall weighted predictions. Experiments show that SAEL outperforms existing methods across various vulnerabilities.
title SAEL: Leveraging Large Language Models with Adaptive Mixture-of-Experts for Smart Contract Vulnerability Detection
topic Cryptography and Security
Artificial Intelligence
Software Engineering
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.22371