VLDB 2026 Research / reviewers in the wild / expert
Zixu Gao
dblp:389/1671
· DBLP profile ↗
2ranked-venue papers
0as first author
2since 2021 · last 2025
0009-0004-9665-5075ORCID · reported
Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several
Software engineering, systems software and programming languages · 2 · 2 since 2021
Expertise — from the expertise taxonomy: the topics of the expert's papers under the CCF categories. A weight counts papers with recency: 1 for a paper about the topic, 0.3 when the topic is its context, halved every five years.
| Software engineering, system software, and programming languages
2 papers |
Program analysis · 62% Compilers and program optimization · 38% | |
| Network and information security
1 paper |
Blockchain and cryptocurrency security · 100% |
Topics — the 6 heaviest of 6, each with the papers that count most for it
| Topic | Weight | Papers | Last | Evidence papers |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Program analysis
static analysis |
1.7 | 2 | 2025 | Satellite: Detecting and Analyzing Smart Contract Vulnerabilities Caused by Subcontract Misuse · IEEE Trans. Software Eng. 2025 Augmenting Smart Contract Decompiler Output Through Fine-Grained Dependency Analysis and LLM-Facilitated Semantic Recovery · IEEE Trans. Software Eng. 2025 |
Blockchain and cryptocurrency security
smart contract security |
0.9 | 1 | 2025 | Satellite: Detecting and Analyzing Smart Contract Vulnerabilities Caused by Subcontract Misuse · IEEE Trans. Software Eng. 2025 |
Compilers and program optimization
decompilation |
0.9 | 1 | 2025 | Augmenting Smart Contract Decompiler Output Through Fine-Grained Dependency Analysis and LLM-Facilitated Semantic Recovery · IEEE Trans. Software Eng. 2025 |
Program analysis › static analysis
dependency analysis |
0.9 | 1 | 2025 | Augmenting Smart Contract Decompiler Output Through Fine-Grained Dependency Analysis and LLM-Facilitated Semantic Recovery · IEEE Trans. Software Eng. 2025 |
Compilers and program optimization › decompilation
smart contract decompilation |
0.9 | 1 | 2025 | Augmenting Smart Contract Decompiler Output Through Fine-Grained Dependency Analysis and LLM-Facilitated Semantic Recovery · IEEE Trans. Software Eng. 2025 |
Program analysis
symbolic execution |
0.3 | 1 | 2025 | Augmenting Smart Contract Decompiler Output Through Fine-Grained Dependency Analysis and LLM-Facilitated Semantic Recovery · IEEE Trans. Software Eng. 2025 |
Methods — techniques the papers use, named apart from their topics
static analysis · 2.6transfer learning · 1.7symbolic execution · 0.9large language model · 0.9formal verification · 0.9
| Year | Publication | Venue | Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2025 | Augmenting Smart Contract Decompiler Output Through Fine-Grained Dependency Analysis and LLM-Facilitated Semantic RecoveryabstractDecompiler is a specialized type of reverse engineering tool extensively employed in program analysis tasks, particularly in program comprehension and vulnerability detection. However, current Solidity smart contract decompilers face significant limitations in reconstructing the original source code. In particular, the bottleneck of SOTA decompilers lies in inaccurate function identification, incorrect variable type recovery, and missing contract attributes. These deficiencies hinder downstream tasks and understanding of the program logic. To address these challenges, we propose SmartHalo, a new framework that enhances decompiler output by combining static analysis (SA) and large language models (LLM). SmartHalo leverages the complementary strengths of SA’s accuracy in control and data flow analysis and LLM’s capability in semantic prediction. More specifically, SmartHalo constructs a new data structure - Dependency Graph (DG), to extract semantic dependencies via static analysis. Then, it takes DG to create prompts for LLM optimization. Finally, the correctness of LLM outputs is validated through symbolic execution and formal verification. Evaluation on a dataset consisting of 465 randomly selected smart contract functions shows that SmartHalo significantly improves the quality of the decompiled code, compared to SOTA decompilers (e.g., Gigahorse). Notably, integrating GPT-4o mini with SmartHalo further enhances its performance, achieving a precision of 91.32% and a recall of 87.38% for function boundaries, a precision of 90.40% and a recall of 88.82% for variable types, and a precision of 80.66% and a recall of 91.78% for contract attributes. Zeqin Liao, Yuhong Nan, Zixu Gao, Henglong Liang, Sicheng Hao 0001, Peifan Reng, Zibin Zheng |
IEEE Trans. Software Eng. | 3 |
| 2025 | Satellite: Detecting and Analyzing Smart Contract Vulnerabilities Caused by Subcontract MisuseabstractCode reuse is a common practice in software engineering. Developers of smart contracts pervasively reuse subcontracts to improve development efficiency. Like any program language, such subcontract reuse may unexpectedly include, or introduce vulnerabilities to the end-point smart contract. Indeed, prior empirical studies have identified a number of issues caused by code reuse in smart contracts. Unfortunately, automatically detecting such issues poses several unique challenges. Particularly, in most cases, smart contracts are compiled as bytecode, whose class-level information (e.g., inheritance, virtual function table), and even semantics (e.g., control flow and data flow) are fully obscured as a single smart contract after compilation. Therefore, it is rather difficult to identify the reused parts of subcontract from a given smart contract, not to mention finding potential vulnerabilities caused by subcontract misuse.In this paper, we propose Satellite, a new bytecode-level static analysis framework for subcontract misuse vulnerability (SMV) detection in smart contracts. Satellite incorporates a series of novel designs to enhance its overall effectiveness.. Particularly, Satellite utilizes a transfer learning method to recover the inherited methods, which are critical for identifying subcontract reuse in smart contracts. Further, Satellite extracts a set of fine-grained method-level features and performs a method-level comparison, for identifying the reuse part of subcontract in smart contracts. Finally, Satellite summarizes a set of SMV indicators according to their types, and hence effectively identifies SMVs. To evaluate Satellite, we construct a dataset consisting of 58 SMVs derived from real-world attacks and collect additional 56 SMV patterns from SOTA studies. Experiment results indicate that Satellite exhibits good performance in identifying SMV, with a precision rate of 84.68% and a recall rate of 92.11%. In addition, Satellite successfully identifies 14 new/unknown SMV over 10,011 realworld smart contracts, affecting a total amount of digital assets worth 201,358 USD. Zeqin Liao, Yuhong Nan, Zixu Gao, Henglong Liang, Sicheng Hao 0001, Jiajing Wu, Zibin Zheng |
IEEE Trans. Software Eng. | 3 |