arXiv AI

Search-Guided Reasoning Trace Curation for Verilog Generation

The paper introduces MCTS‑SFT, a verifier‑guided framework that uses Monte Carlo Tree Search to curate structured reasoning traces for fine‑tuning Verilog generation models. Within this framework, Plan‑MCTS searches over compact hardware‑design plans that explicitly encode interfaces, timing, state, behavior, and update rules, and retains these plans during supervised fine‑tuning. Experiments show that Plan‑MCTS yields the highest functional trace accuracy (84.2%) and improves downstream model performance, raising pass@10 from 52.56% to 57.7% and outperforming chain‑of‑thought distillation by up to 3.7 points while halving generation length.

arXiv AI
Jun 4

StepPRM-RTL: Stepwise Process-Reward Guided LLM Fine-Tuning for Enhanced RTL Synthesis

arXiv:2606. 04246v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Automatic generation of RTL code for digital hardware designs remains challenging due to long-horizon reasoning, multi-step dependencies, and strict correctness constraints in Verilog and VHDL.

By Prashanth Vijayaraghavan, Apoorva Nitsure, Luyao Shi, Ehsan Degan, Vandana Mukherjee
arXiv AI
Sep 1

Zipping the Thought: When and How Compressed Reasoning Data Works in LLM Post-Training

The paper investigates how different forms of compressed chain‑of‑thought (CoT) reasoning—Explicit, Composed, and Implicit—affect large language model (LLM) performance after supervised fine‑tuning (SFT). Using a synthetic compositional reasoning task, the authors show that coarser CoT requires more SFT data, that Composed and Implicit CoT benefit more from data scaling (with Composed also benefiting from repetition), and that reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) can decompose compressed steps learned during SFT. Additionally, unidirectional CoT ordering improves generalization on longer sequential tasks.

By Kohsei Matsutani, Gouki Minegishi, Takeshi Kojima, Yusuke Iwasawa, Yutaka Matsuo
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 28

Benchmarking LLMs for Verilog Design Flows

arXiv:2607. 22759v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) show promise in code generation, but their capabilities to produce correct, synthesizable hardware description language (HDL) code still remain to be properly benchmarked.

By Angshuman Chakravertty, Rahul Koshti, Buddhi Prakash Sharma, Vinay Chamola
arXiv AI
Jun 26

NebulaExp-8B: An Empirical Post-Training Pipeline via Full-Scale Ablation Research

arXiv:2606. 26671v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Post-training alignment determines the reasoning and human preference following capabilities of large language models, yet most existing works withhold detailed data construction, filtering rules and training recipes, which hinders community reproducibility and lightweight model optimization.

By Qiaobo Hao, Yangqian Wu, Shunyi Wang, Zhongjian Zhang, Ziqun Li, Yayin He, Muqing Li, Chen Zhong
arXiv AI
Aug 18

Rethinking Generalization in Reasoning SFT: A Conditional Analysis on Optimization, Data, and Model Capability

arXiv:2604. 06628v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: A prevailing narrative in LLM post-training holds that supervised finetuning (SFT) memorizes while reinforcement learning (RL) generalizes.

By Qihan Ren, Peng Wang, Ruikun Cai, Shuai Shao, Dadi Guo, Yuejin Xie, Yafu Li, Quanshi Zhang, Xia Hu, Jing Shao, Dongrui Liu
arXiv AI
Oct 16

The Density of Thought: Predicting and Steering Reasoning in Large Language Models

The paper studies how the distribution of information across chain‑of‑thought steps—measured by LP variance and Caveman compression ratio—relates to answer correctness in large language models. Across six model sizes, two training paradigms, and 60 GSM8K problems, it finds that lower LP variance predicts accuracy in supervised fine‑tuned models but not in reinforcement‑learning distilled ones, that models prefer more complex distributions, and that steering density at inference time harms accuracy while pre‑generation nudging and a new Entropy‑Gated Density Routing method improve it. The work demonstrates that natural density patterns are functionally important for reasoning and offers practical techniques to enhance performance.

By Tanush Kalhan, Anupam Chattopadhyay, Sriram Ranga, Amritendu Mukherjee
arXiv Computation and Language
Oct 22

Reasoning-Search-Augmented LLMs: An Operational Taxonomy, Benchmark Analysis and Controlled Evidence Synthesis

The paper reviews and categorizes large language models that combine step‑by‑step reasoning with interactive search, treating retrieval as an action within an iterative agentic loop. It analyzes these systems along four architectural axes—retrieval coupling, controller design, knowledge source, and grounding strictness—while also considering the learning signal as a cross‑cutting factor. The authors conduct controlled ablations and benchmark analyses to clarify how design choices affect search, stopping, and grounding behavior, aiming to provide a unified perspective for future research.

By Biswas Poudel, Nilson Chapagain, Amit Kumar, Xianshun Jiang