arXiv subjects

Ye Liu

Publications and source records attributed to Ye Liu.

At least 73 records · Page 4Linked to original sources

arXiv2025

Toward Structured Knowledge Reasoning: Contrastive Retrieval-Augmented Generation on Experience

Large language models (LLMs) achieve strong performance on plain text tasks but underperform on structured data like tables and databases. Potential challenges arise from their underexposure during pre-training and rigid text-to-structure transfer mechanisms. Unlike humans who seamlessly apply learned patterns across data modalities, LLMs struggle to infer implicit relationships embedded in tabular formats, especially in the absence of explicit structural guidance. To bridge this cognitive gap, we introduce Contrastive Retrieval-Augmented Generation on Experience (CoRE), a framework that builds experience memory representations and enhances generalization through contrastive In-Context Learning (ICL) to simulate human-like knowledge transfer. Experiments on Text-to-SQL and TableQA show CoRE significantly improves performance, achieving average gains of 3.44% and 4.24%, with up to 17.2% on challenging tasks. Our Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS)-generated Experience Memory expands training data 8-9x, enhancing diversity and domain coverage. This training-free and continual method propels LLMs toward structured knowledge expertise.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

ACFIX: Guiding LLMs with Mined Common RBAC Practices for Context-Aware Repair of Access Control Vulnerabilities in Smart Contracts

Smart contracts are susceptible to various security issues, among which access control (AC) vulnerabilities are particularly critical. While existing research has proposed multiple detection tools, the automatic and appropriate repair of AC vulnerabilities in smart contracts remains a challenge. Unlike commonly supported vulnerability types by existing repair tools, such as reentrancy, which are usually fixed by template-based approaches, the main obstacle of AC lies in identifying the appropriate roles or permissions amid a long list of non-AC-related source code to generate proper patch code, a task that demands human-level intelligence. Leveraging recent advancements in large language models (LLMs), we employ the state-of-the-art GPT-4 model and enhance it with a novel approach called ACFIX. The key insight is that we can mine common AC practices for major categories of code functionality and use them to guide LLMs in fixing code with similar functionality. To this end, ACFIX involves both offline and online phases. First, during the offline phase, ACFIX mines a taxonomy of common Role-based Access Control (RBAC) practices from 344,251 on-chain contracts, categorizing 49 role-permission pairs from the top 1,000 pairs mined. Second, during the online phase, ACFIX tracks AC-related elements across the contract and uses this context information along with a Chain-of-Thought pipeline to guide LLMs in identifying the most appropriate role-permission pair for the subject contract and subsequently generating a suitable patch. This patch will then undergo a validity and effectiveness check. To evaluate ACFIX, we built the first benchmark dataset of 118 real-world AC vulnerabilities, and our evaluation revealed that ACFIX successfully repaired 94.92% of them. This represents a significant improvement compared to the baseline GPT-4, which achieved only 52.54%.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2025

DITING: A Static Analyzer for Identifying Bad Partitioning Issues in TEE Applications

Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) enhances the security of mobile applications and cloud services by isolating sensitive code in the secure world from the non-secure normal world. However, TEE applications are still confronted with vulnerabilities stemming from bad partitioning. Bad partitioning can lead to critical security problems of TEE, such as leaking sensitive data to the normal world or being adversely affected by malicious inputs from the normal world. To address this, we propose an approach to detect partitioning issues in TEE applications. First, we conducted a survey of TEE vulnerabilities caused by bad partitioning and found that the parameters exchanged between the secure and normal worlds often contain insecure usage with bad partitioning implementation. Second, we developed a tool named DITING that can analyze data-flows of these parameters and identify their violations of security rules we defined to find bad partitioning issues. Different from existing research that only focuses on malicious input to TEE, we assess the partitioning issues more comprehensively through input/output and shared memory. Finally, we created the first benchmark targeting bad partitioning, consisting of 110 test cases. Experiments demonstrate that DITING achieves an F1 score of 0.90 in identifying bad partitioning issues.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2025

VLM2Vec-V2: Advancing Multimodal Embedding for Videos, Images, and Visual Documents

Multimodal embedding models have been crucial in enabling various downstream tasks such as semantic similarity, information retrieval, and clustering over different modalities. However, existing multimodal embeddings like VLM2Vec, E5-V, GME are predominantly focused on natural images, with limited support for other visual forms such as videos and visual documents. This restricts their applicability in real-world scenarios, including AI agents, multi-modal search and recommendation, and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). To close this gap, we propose VLM2Vec-V2, a unified framework for learning embeddings across diverse visual forms. First, we introduce MMEB-V2, a comprehensive benchmark that extends MMEB with five new task types: visual document retrieval, video retrieval, temporal grounding, video classification and video question answering - spanning text, image, video, and visual document inputs. Next, we train VLM2Vec-V2, a general-purpose embedding model that supports text, image, video, and visual document inputs. Extensive experiments show that VLM2Vec-V2 achieves strong performance not only on the newly introduced video and document retrieval tasks, but also improves over prior baselines on the original image benchmarks. Through extensive evaluation, our study offers insights into the generalizability of various multimodal embedding models and highlights effective strategies for unified embedding learning, laying the groundwork for more scalable and adaptable representation learning in both research and real-world settings.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Study of Stability and Consistency of EAS Thermal Neutron Detection at ENDA-64

Introduction:Electron-Neutron Detector Array (ENDA) is designed to measure thermal neutrons produced by hadronic interactions between cosmic ray extensive air showers (EAS) and the surrounding environment as well as electrons around the cores of EAS. ENDA is located within Large High Altitude Air Shower Observatory (LHAASO). ENDA was expanded from an initial 16 detectors to 64 detectors in April 2023, so called ENDA-64, and has been running alongside LHAASO. The stability and consistency of neutron detection are crucial for laying a solid foundation for subsequent data analysis and physical results. Methods:We obtain the stability by studying variations of event rate and thermal neutron rate in each cluster and the consistency by comparing distribution of number of thermal neutrons between clusters. Additionally, we investigate the specific influences of the rainy and dry seasons, as well as the presence or absence of sand cubes under the detectors, to examine the environmental factors affecting neutron measurement performance. Results:The calibration results indicate good consistency in thermal neutron detection across the clusters, with the maximum inconsistency of 6.85%. The maximum instability of event rate and thermal neutron rate over time are 4.68% and 11.0% respectively. The maximum inconsistency between the clusters without the sand cubes is 18%. The use of sand cubes is effective in protecting the target material from rainwater, and the sand cubes help the cluster to increase collection of neutrons generated by EAS events.

hep-ex↗

arXiv2025

Self-Reflective Planning with Knowledge Graphs: Enhancing LLM Reasoning Reliability for Question Answering

Recently, large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in natural language processing tasks, yet they remain prone to hallucinations when reasoning with insufficient internal knowledge. While integrating LLMs with knowledge graphs (KGs) provides access to structured, verifiable information, existing approaches often generate incomplete or factually inconsistent reasoning paths. To this end, we propose Self-Reflective Planning (SRP), a framework that synergizes LLMs with KGs through iterative, reference-guided reasoning. Specifically, given a question and topic entities, SRP first searches for references to guide planning and reflection. In the planning process, it checks initial relations and generates a reasoning path. After retrieving knowledge from KGs through a reasoning path, it implements iterative reflection by judging the retrieval result and editing the reasoning path until the answer is correctly retrieved. Extensive experiments on three public datasets demonstrate that SRP surpasses various strong baselines and further underscore its reliable reasoning ability.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Know3-RAG: A Knowledge-aware RAG Framework with Adaptive Retrieval, Generation, and Filtering

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have led to impressive progress in natural language generation, yet their tendency to produce hallucinated or unsubstantiated content remains a critical concern. To improve factual reliability, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) integrates external knowledge during inference. However, existing RAG systems face two major limitations: (1) unreliable adaptive control due to limited external knowledge supervision, and (2) hallucinations caused by inaccurate or irrelevant references. To address these issues, we propose Know3-RAG, a knowledge-aware RAG framework that leverages structured knowledge from knowledge graphs (KGs) to guide three core stages of the RAG process, including retrieval, generation, and filtering. Specifically, we introduce a knowledge-aware adaptive retrieval module that employs KG embedding to assess the confidence of the generated answer and determine retrieval necessity, a knowledge-enhanced reference generation strategy that enriches queries with KG-derived entities to improve generated reference relevance, and a knowledge-driven reference filtering mechanism that ensures semantic alignment and factual accuracy of references. Experiments on multiple open-domain QA benchmarks demonstrate that Know3-RAG consistently outperforms strong baselines, significantly reducing hallucinations and enhancing answer reliability.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

ABase: the Multi-Tenant NoSQL Serverless Database for Diverse and Dynamic Workloads in Large-scale Cloud Environments

Multi-tenant architectures enhance the elasticity and resource utilization of NoSQL databases by allowing multiple tenants to co-locate and share resources. However, in large-scale cloud environments, the diverse and dynamic nature of workloads poses significant challenges for multi-tenant NoSQL databases. Based on our practical observations, we have identified three crucial challenges: (1) the impact of caching on performance isolation, as cache hits alter request execution and resource consumption, leading to inaccurate traffic control; (2) the dynamic changes in traffic, with changes in tenant traffic trends causing throttling or resource wastage, and changes in access distribution causing hot key pressure or cache hit ratio drops; and (3) the imbalanced layout of data nodes due to tenants' diverse resource requirements, leading to low resource utilization. To address these challenges, we introduce ABase, a multi-tenant NoSQL serverless database developed at ByteDance. ABase introduces a two-layer caching mechanism with a cache-aware isolation mechanism to ensure accurate resource consumption estimates. Furthermore, ABase employs a predictive autoscaling policy to dynamically adjust resources in response to tenant traffic changes and a multi-resource rescheduling algorithm to balance resource utilization across data nodes. With these innovations, ABase has successfully served ByteDance's large-scale cloud environment, supporting a total workload that has achieved a peak QPS of over 13 billion and total storage exceeding 1 EB.

cs.DB↗

arXiv2025

Specification Mining for Smart Contracts with Trace Slicing and Predicate Abstraction

Smart contracts are computer programs running on blockchains to implement Decentralized Applications. The absence of contract specifications hinders routine tasks, such as contract understanding and testing. In this work, we propose a specification mining approach to infer contract specifications from past transaction histories. Our approach derives high-level behavioral automata of function invocations, accompanied by program invariants statistically inferred from the transaction histories. We implemented our approach as tool SMCON and evaluated it on eleven well-studied Azure benchmark smart contracts and six popular real-world DApp smart contracts. The experiments show that SMCON mines reasonably accurate specifications that can be used to enhance symbolic analysis of smart contracts achieving higher code coverage and up to 56% speedup, and facilitate DApp developers in maintaining high-quality documentation and test suites.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2025

Affordance-Aware Object Insertion via Mask-Aware Dual Diffusion

As a common image editing operation, image composition involves integrating foreground objects into background scenes. In this paper, we expand the application of the concept of Affordance from human-centered image composition tasks to a more general object-scene composition framework, addressing the complex interplay between foreground objects and background scenes. Following the principle of Affordance, we define the affordance-aware object insertion task, which aims to seamlessly insert any object into any scene with various position prompts. To address the limited data issue and incorporate this task, we constructed the SAM-FB dataset, which contains over 3 million examples across more than 3,000 object categories. Furthermore, we propose the Mask-Aware Dual Diffusion (MADD) model, which utilizes a dual-stream architecture to simultaneously denoise the RGB image and the insertion mask. By explicitly modeling the insertion mask in the diffusion process, MADD effectively facilitates the notion of affordance. Extensive experimental results show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods and exhibits strong generalization performance on in-the-wild images. Please refer to our code on https://github.com/KaKituken/affordance-aware-any.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Towards Secure Program Partitioning for Smart Contracts with LLM's In-Context Learning

Smart contracts are highly susceptible to manipulation attacks due to the leakage of sensitive information. Addressing manipulation vulnerabilities is particularly challenging because they stem from inherent data confidentiality issues rather than straightforward implementation bugs. To tackle this by preventing sensitive information leakage, we present PartitionGPT, the first LLM-driven approach that combines static analysis with the in-context learning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) to partition smart contracts into privileged and normal codebases, guided by a few annotated sensitive data variables. We evaluated PartitionGPT on 18 annotated smart contracts containing 99 sensitive functions. The results demonstrate that PartitionGPT successfully generates compilable, and verified partitions for 78% of the sensitive functions while reducing approximately 30% code compared to function-level partitioning approach. Furthermore, we evaluated PartitionGPT on nine real-world manipulation attacks that lead to a total loss of 25 million dollars, PartitionGPT effectively prevents eight cases, highlighting its potential for broad applicability and the necessity for secure program partitioning during smart contract development to diminish manipulation vulnerabilities.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2025

Phantom Events: Demystifying the Issues of Log Forgery in Blockchain

With the rapid development of blockchain technology, transaction logs play a central role in various applications, including decentralized exchanges, wallets, cross-chain bridges, and other third-party services. However, these logs, particularly those based on smart contract events, are highly susceptible to manipulation and forgery, creating substantial security risks across the ecosystem. To address this issue, we present the first in-depth security analysis of transaction log forgery in EVM-based blockchains, a phenomenon we term Phantom Events. We systematically model five types of attacks and propose a tool designed to detect event forgery vulnerabilities in smart contracts. Our evaluation demonstrates that our approach outperforms existing tools in identifying potential phantom events. Furthermore, we have successfully identified real-world instances for all five types of attacks across multiple decentralized applications. Finally, we call on community developers to take proactive steps to address these critical security vulnerabilities.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2025

Smart Contract Fuzzing Towards Profitable Vulnerabilities

Billions of dollars are transacted through smart contracts, making vulnerabilities a major financial risk. One focus in the security arms race is on profitable vulnerabilities that attackers can exploit. Fuzzing is a key method for identifying these vulnerabilities. However, current solutions face two main limitations: a lack of profit-centric techniques for expediting detection, and insufficient automation in maximizing the profitability of discovered vulnerabilities, leaving the analysis to human experts. To address these gaps, we have developed VERITE, a profit-centric smart contract fuzzing framework that not only effectively detects those profitable vulnerabilities but also maximizes the exploited profits. VERITE has three key features: 1) DeFi action-based mutators for boosting the exploration of transactions with different fund flows; 2) potentially profitable candidates identification criteria, which checks whether the input has caused abnormal fund flow properties during testing; 3) a gradient descent-based profit maximization strategy for these identified candidates. VERITE is fully developed from scratch and evaluated on a dataset consisting of 61 exploited real-world DeFi projects with an average of over 1.1 million dollars loss. The results show that VERITE can automatically extract more than 18 million dollars in total and is significantly better than state-of-the-art fuzzer ITYFUZZ in both detection (29/10) and exploitation (134 times more profits gained on average). Remarkably, in 12 targets, it gains more profits than real-world attacking exploits (1.01 to 11.45 times more). VERITE is also applied by auditors in contract auditing, where 6 (5 high severity) zero-day vulnerabilities are found with over $2,500 bounty rewards.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2025

Conformal Uncertainty Indicator for Continual Test-Time Adaptation

Continual Test-Time Adaptation (CTTA) aims to adapt models to sequentially changing domains during testing, relying on pseudo-labels for self-adaptation. However, incorrect pseudo-labels can accumulate, leading to performance degradation. To address this, we propose a Conformal Uncertainty Indicator (CUI) for CTTA, leveraging Conformal Prediction (CP) to generate prediction sets that include the true label with a specified coverage probability. Since domain shifts can lower the coverage than expected, making CP unreliable, we dynamically compensate for the coverage by measuring both domain and data differences. Reliable pseudo-labels from CP are then selectively utilized to enhance adaptation. Experiments confirm that CUI effectively estimates uncertainty and improves adaptation performance across various existing CTTA methods.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

MLLM-CompBench: A Comparative Reasoning Benchmark for Multimodal LLMs

The ability to compare objects, scenes, or situations is crucial for effective decision-making and problem-solving in everyday life. For instance, comparing the freshness of apples enables better choices during grocery shopping while comparing sofa designs helps optimize the aesthetics of our living space. Despite its significance, the comparative capability is largely unexplored in artificial general intelligence (AGI). In this paper, we introduce MLLM-CompBench, a benchmark designed to evaluate the comparative reasoning capability of multimodal large language models (MLLMs). MLLM-CompBench mines and pairs images through visually oriented questions covering eight dimensions of relative comparison: visual attribute, existence, state, emotion, temporality, spatiality, quantity, and quality. We curate a collection of around 40K image pairs using metadata from diverse vision datasets and CLIP similarity scores. These image pairs span a broad array of visual domains, including animals, fashion, sports, and both outdoor and indoor scenes. The questions are carefully crafted to discern relative characteristics between two images and are labeled by human annotators for accuracy and relevance. We use MLLM-CompBench to evaluate recent MLLMs, including GPT-4V(ision), Gemini-Pro, and LLaVA-1.6. Our results reveal notable shortcomings in their comparative abilities. We believe MLLM-COMPBENCH not only sheds light on these limitations but also establishes a solid foundation for future enhancements in the comparative capability of MLLMs.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

AFFAKT: A Hierarchical Optimal Transport based Method for Affective Facial Knowledge Transfer in Video Deception Detection

The scarcity of high-quality large-scale labeled datasets poses a huge challenge for employing deep learning models in video deception detection. To address this issue, inspired by the psychological theory on the relation between deception and expressions, we propose a novel method called AFFAKT in this paper, which enhances the classification performance by transferring useful and correlated knowledge from a large facial expression dataset. Two key challenges in knowledge transfer arise: 1) \textit{how much} knowledge of facial expression data should be transferred and 2) \textit{how to} effectively leverage transferred knowledge for the deception classification model during inference. Specifically, the optimal relation mapping between facial expression classes and deception samples is firstly quantified using proposed H-OTKT module and then transfers knowledge from the facial expression dataset to deception samples. Moreover, a correlation prototype within another proposed module SRKB is well designed to retain the invariant correlations between facial expression classes and deception classes through momentum updating. During inference, the transferred knowledge is fine-tuned with the correlation prototype using a sample-specific re-weighting strategy. Experimental results on two deception detection datasets demonstrate the superior performance of our proposed method. The interpretability study reveals high associations between deception and negative affections, which coincides with the theory in psychology.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

PropertyGPT: LLM-driven Formal Verification of Smart Contracts through Retrieval-Augmented Property Generation

With recent advances in large language models (LLMs), this paper explores the potential of leveraging state-of-the-art LLMs,such as GPT-4, to transfer existing human-written properties (e.g.,those from Certora auditing reports) and automatically generate customized properties for unknown code. To this end, we embed existing properties into a vector database and retrieve a reference property for LLM-based in-context learning to generate a new property for a given code. While this basic process is relatively straightforward, ensuring that the generated properties are (i) compilable, (ii) appropriate, and (iii) verifiable presents challenges. To address (i), we use the compilation and static analysis feedback as an external oracle to guide LLMs in iteratively revising the generated properties. For (ii), we consider multiple dimensions of similarity to rank the properties and employ a weighted algorithm to identify the top-K properties as the final result. For (iii), we design a dedicated prover to formally verify the correctness of the generated properties. We have implemented these strategies into a novel LLM-based property generation tool called PropertyGPT. Our experiments show that PropertyGPT can generate comprehensive and high-quality properties, achieving an 80% recall compared to the ground truth. It successfully detected 26 CVEs/attack incidents out of 37 tested and also uncovered 12 zero-day vulnerabilities, leading to $8,256 in bug bounty rewards.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2024

Can Large Language Models Serve as Evaluators for Code Summarization?

Code summarization facilitates program comprehension and software maintenance by converting code snippets into natural-language descriptions. Over the years, numerous methods have been developed for this task, but a key challenge remains: effectively evaluating the quality of generated summaries. While human evaluation is effective for assessing code summary quality, it is labor-intensive and difficult to scale. Commonly used automatic metrics, such as BLEU, ROUGE-L, METEOR, and BERTScore, often fail to align closely with human judgments. In this paper, we explore the potential of Large Language Models (LLMs) for evaluating code summarization. We propose CODERPE (Role-Player for Code Summarization Evaluation), a novel method that leverages role-player prompting to assess the quality of generated summaries. Specifically, we prompt an LLM agent to play diverse roles, such as code reviewer, code author, code editor, and system analyst. Each role evaluates the quality of code summaries across key dimensions, including coherence, consistency, fluency, and relevance. We further explore the robustness of LLMs as evaluators by employing various prompting strategies, including chain-of-thought reasoning, in-context learning, and tailored rating form designs. The results demonstrate that LLMs serve as effective evaluators for code summarization methods. Notably, our LLM-based evaluator, CODERPE , achieves an 81.59% Spearman correlation with human evaluations, outperforming the existing BERTScore metric by 17.27%.

cs.SE↗