Combining Fine-Tuning and LLM-based Agents for Intuitive Smart Contract Auditing with Justifications
<|reference_start|>Combining Fine-Tuning and LLM-based Agents for Intuitive Smart Contract Auditing with Justifications: Smart contracts are decentralized applications built atop blockchains like Ethereum. Recent research has shown that large language models (LLMs) have potential in auditing smart contracts, but the state-of-the-art indicates that even GPT-4 can achieve only 30% precision (when both decision and justification are correct). This is likely because off-the-shelf LLMs were primarily pre-trained on a general text/code corpus and not fine-tuned on the specific domain of Solidity smart contract auditing.   In this paper, we propose iAudit, a general framework that combines fine-tuning and LLM-based agents for intuitive smart contract auditing with justifications. Specifically, iAudit is inspired by the observation that expert human auditors first perceive what could be wrong and then perform a detailed analysis of the code to identify the cause. As such, iAudit employs a two-stage fine-tuning approach: it first tunes a Detector model to make decisions and then tunes a Reasoner model to generate causes of vulnerabilities. However, fine-tuning alone faces challenges in accurately identifying the optimal cause of a vulnerability. Therefore, we introduce two LLM-based agents, the Ranker and Critic, to iteratively select and debate the most suitable cause of vulnerability based on the output of the fine-tuned Reasoner model. To evaluate iAudit, we collected a balanced dataset with 1,734 positive and 1,810 negative samples to fine-tune iAudit. We then compared it with traditional fine-tuned models (CodeBERT, GraphCodeBERT, CodeT5, and UnixCoder) as well as prompt learning-based LLMs (GPT4, GPT-3.5, and CodeLlama-13b/34b). On a dataset of 263 real smart contract vulnerabilities, iAudit achieves an F1 score of 91.21% and an accuracy of 91.11%. The causes generated by iAudit achieved a consistency of about 38% compared to the ground truth causes.<|reference_end|>
@article{ma2024combining,
    title={Combining Fine-Tuning and LLM-based Agents for Intuitive Smart Contract
  Auditing with Justifications},
    author={Wei Ma, Daoyuan Wu, Yuqiang Sun, Tianwen Wang, Shangqing Liu, Jian
  Zhang, Yue Xue, and Yang Liu},
    journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2403.16073},
    year={2024},
    archivePrefix={arXiv},
    eprint={2403.16073},
    primaryClass={cs.SE}
}