MTVHunter: Smart Contracts Vulnerability Detection Based on Multi-Teacher Knowledge Translation
Guokai Sun, Yuan Zhuang, Shuo Zhang, Xiaoyu Feng, Zhenguang Liu, Liguo Zhang
Abstract
Smart contracts, closely intertwined with cryptocurrency transactions, have sparked widespread concerns about considerable financial losses of security issues. To counteract this, a variety of tools have been developed to identify vulnerability in smart contract. However, they fail to overcome two challenges at the same time when faced with smart contract bytecode: (i) strong interference caused by enormous non-relevant instructions; (ii) missing semantics of bytecode due to incomplete data and control flow dependencies. In this paper, we propose a multi-teacher based bytecode vulnerability detection method, namely Multi-Teacher Vulnerability Hunter (MTVHunter), which delivers effective denoising and missing semantic to bytecode under multi-teacher guidance. Specifically, we first propose an instruction denoising teacher to eliminate noise interference by abstract vulnerability pattern and further reflect in contract embeddings. Secondly, we design a novel semantic complementary teacher with neuron distillation, which effectively extracts necessary semantic from source code to replenish the bytecode. Particularly, the proposed neuron distillation accelerate this semantic filling by turning the knowledge transition into a regression task. We conduct experiments on 229,178 real-world smart contracts that concerns four types of common vulnerabilities. Extensive experiments show MTVHunter achieves significantly performance gains over state-of-the-art approaches.
BibTeX
@article{Sun_Zhuang_Zhang_Feng_Liu_Zhang_2025, title={MTVHunter: Smart Contracts Vulnerability Detection Based on Multi-Teacher Knowledge Translation}, volume={39}, url={https://ojs.aaai.org/index.php/AAAI/article/view/33664}, DOI={10.1609/aaai.v39i14.33664}, abstractNote={Smart contracts, closely intertwined with cryptocurrency transactions, have sparked widespread concerns about considerable
financial losses of security issues. To counteract this, a variety of tools have been developed to identify vulnerability
in smart contract. However, they fail to overcome two challenges at the same time when faced with smart contract
bytecode: (i) strong interference caused by enormous non-relevant instructions; (ii) missing semantics of bytecode
due to incomplete data and control flow dependencies. In this paper, we propose a multi-teacher based bytecode vulnerability
detection method, namely Multi-Teacher Vulnerability Hunter (MTVHunter), which delivers effective denoising
and missing semantic to bytecode under multi-teacher guidance. Specifically, we first propose an instruction denoising
teacher to eliminate noise interference by abstract vulnerability pattern and further reflect in contract embeddings. Secondly,
we design a novel semantic complementary teacher with neuron distillation, which effectively extracts necessary
semantic from source code to replenish the bytecode. Particularly, the proposed neuron distillation accelerate this semantic filling by turning the knowledge transition into a regression task. We conduct experiments on 229,178 real-world smart contracts that concerns four types of common vulnerabilities.
Extensive experiments show MTVHunter achieves significantly
performance gains over state-of-the-art approaches.}, number={14}, journal={Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence}, author={Sun, Guokai and Zhuang, Yuan and Zhang, Shuo and Feng, Xiaoyu and Liu, Zhenguang and Zhang, Liguo}, year={2025}, month={Apr.}, pages={15169-15176} }