arXiv Computation and Language

CovR: Coverage-Aware Hardware Verification via Reasoning-Guided Reinforcement Learning

CovR is an agentic framework that automates testbench generation for hardware verification by combining self-reflection loops with simulation-based feedback to maximize coverage. It builds a large dataset of 16,514 specification–RTL reasoning tuples and uses reinforcement learning with tool-derived rewards to train a student model, achieving high coverage scores on VerilogEval, RTLLM V2.0, and CVDP. When deployed as a plug-in stimulus engine, CovR boosts coverage by nearly 19% and improves mutation detection while uncovering previously undetected failures.

arXiv AI
Jun 2

LLM4Cov: Execution-Aware Agentic Learning for High-coverage Testbench Generation

arXiv:2602. 16953v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Execution-aware LLM agents offer a promising paradigm for learning from tool feedback, but such feedback can be expensive and slow to obtain, making online reinforcement learning (RL) less practical in certain scenarios.

By Hejia Zhang, Zhongming Yu, Chia-Tung Ho, Haoxing Ren, Brucek Khailany, Jishen Zhao
arXiv AI
Jul 31

GoGoTB: Agentic RTL Verification with Specification-Grounded Coverage Closure

arXiv:2607. 26181v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Functional verification dominates integrated circuit (IC) front-end engineering effort, and a single missed bug that escapes to silicon can trigger a costly respin.

By Xin Xin, Jincheng Lou, Junhui Li, Jinglin Yan, Panda Xiao, Di Wu, Haixiao Li, Weicong Lu, Weijian Fan, Xinyu Qu, Yuxiang Zhao, Min Yu, Zhixiong Di, Yibo Lin
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 28

GoGoTB: Agentic RTL Verification with Specification-Grounded Coverage Closure

Functional verification dominates integrated circuit (IC) front-end engineering effort, and a single missed bug that escapes to silicon can trigger a costly respin. Recent large language models (LLMs) offer new opportunities to automate this process, yet existing LLM-based approaches generate each component through independent single-turn calls with no shared context, leaving interface mismatches undetected and reported coverage disconnected from specification requirements.

Hugging Face Trending Papers
Aug 17

TDD-Agent: Test-Driven Reasoning for Code Generation

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable progress in code generation, yet ensuring correctness in complex, repository-level tasks remains challenging. Existing approaches often use generated tests as static post-hoc validators, which limits their ability to guide implementation and may introduce misleading feedback when the tests themselves are incomplete or incorrect.

arXiv Machine Learning
1d ago

ChipMEM: Verification-Grounded Memory for EDA Agents

ChipMEM introduces a verification‑grounded memory layer for electronic design automation agents that combines cross‑task procedural memory with within‑trajectory statistical guidance. The procedural component stores a skill only after it passes synthesis, simulation, or formal checks, while a Bayesian component ranks recovery strategies based on tool‑call outcomes. Experiments on RTLRewriter‑Bench and CVDP tasks show that ChipMEM improves equivalence‑passing outputs and area metrics compared to agents without memory.

By Abdulrahman AlRabah, Joshua Mabry, Dilek Hakkani-T\"ur, Abdussalam Alawini, Hamid Shojaei, Kartik Hegde, Sandesh Adhikary
arXiv AI
Aug 20

Coverage-Driven RTL Assertion Generation with Formal Exploration and Neuro-Symbolic Refinement

The paper introduces NeuroAssertion, a coverage-driven framework for generating RTL assertions that integrates formal trace generation, syntax-guided synthesis, and a two-step large language model (LLM) refinement process. It transforms hard-to-reach control-flow conditions into formal reachability goals, uses model checking to produce diverse traces, and mines initial assertions via SyGuS. The refinement stage employs one LLM to propose candidate assertions for uncovered regions and a second LLM to generate repair grammars that guide symbolic synthesis, resulting in roughly twice as many assertions and higher mutation coverage compared to traditional methods.

By Zhiyuan Yan, Ziyue Zheng, Hongce Zhang
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 27

Scalable Supervision for Software Agents via Patch Reasoning

The paper introduces R4P, a reasoning‑based supervision method for software agents that eliminates the need for test execution by using a group‑wise training objective to verify multiple patches simultaneously. R4P achieves 72.2% accuracy on the SWE‑bench patch verification task, matching proprietary models, and enables the creation of an execution‑free scaffold called Mini‑SE. Mini‑SE, trained purely with reinforcement learning via R4P, improves Pass@1 from 26.2% to 32.8% over the baseline Qwen3‑32B, demonstrating R4P’s practical utility and scalable performance.

By Junjielong Xu, Boyin Tan, Xiaoyuan Liu, Chao Peng, Pengfei Gao, Pinjia He