Shixiong Kai

PSBC LLM Team, Huawei LLM Team, Ruihan Long et al.

Large language models (LLMs) drive significant financial innovations, yet their high-concurrency deployment is severely bottlenecked by KV cache memory overhead, which inflates infrastructure costs and throttles scalability. To address this, we propose YouZhi-LLM, a highly efficient financial LLM empowered by a comprehensive structural transition and training pipeline natively built on the Huawei Ascend ecosystem. At its algorithmic core, YouZhi-LLM features a layer-adaptive GQA-to-MLA transition framework that dynamically assigns per-layer FreqFold sizes, maximizing KV-cache compression while minimizing perplexity degradation. To recover representation capacity and inject domain expertise, the Ascend-based training pipeline seamlessly integrates generalized knowledge distillation with financial-specific supervised fine-tuning. Evaluations demonstrate the superiority of this systematic approach, with the adaptive transition reducing perplexity degradation by up to 35% over uniform baselines. Crucially, when evaluated on Ascend NPUs via vLLM-Ascend, the massive KV-cache reduction translates directly into deployment efficiency. Compared to their respective base models, YouZhi-7B yields a 12.3% improvement in average financial benchmark score alongside a 2.69$\times$ increase in maximum concurrency; similarly, YouZhi-14B achieves a 7.0% accuracy gain and a 2.43$\times$ concurrency boost, establishing a new paradigm for cost-effective, high-throughput financial inference.

Mingyang Liu, Qingcan Kang, Yuke Wang et al.

Incorporating news into time series forecasting is appealing because news can reveal abrupt exogenous events that historical values alone cannot recover. However, existing LLM-based news-forecasting pipelines face two practical limitations: relevant news articles often exceed the model's context window, and iterative retrieval of supplementary news is typically unguided, leading to redundant updates and slow convergence. We address these issues with a novel framework that combines importance-aware news compression and process-level retrieval supervision. First, we train an importance reward model that estimates the forecasting utility of each article and uses this signal to allocate compression budgets during sequential pairwise fusion, preserving informative content within a fixed context limit. Second, we introduce a process reward model (PRM) that ranks multiple supplementary-news candidates conditioned on the current error profile and the history of previously selected articles, replacing one-shot blind retrieval with quality-controlled selection. Both components are trained offline using historical data with ground truth; inference uses the frozen filtering logic and compression modules without any reflection loop. Experiments on finance, energy, traffic, and bitcoin forecasting benchmarks show that our method improves prediction accuracy over strong baselines, significantly reduces the number of refinement iterations compared to the iterative baseline, and remains effective when relevant articles span thousands of tokens.

Zhengbang Zhu, Shenyu Zhang, Yuzheng Zhuang et al.

High-quality traffic flow generation is the core module in building simulators for autonomous driving. However, the majority of available simulators are incapable of replicating traffic patterns that accurately reflect the various features of real-world data while also simulating human-like reactive responses to the tested autopilot driving strategies. Taking one step forward to addressing such a problem, we propose Realistic Interactive TrAffic flow (RITA) as an integrated component of existing driving simulators to provide high-quality traffic flow for the evaluation and optimization of the tested driving strategies. RITA is developed with consideration of three key features, i.e., fidelity, diversity, and controllability, and consists of two core modules called RITABackend and RITAKit. RITABackend is built to support vehicle-wise control and provide traffic generation models from real-world datasets, while RITAKit is developed with easy-to-use interfaces for controllable traffic generation via RITABackend. We demonstrate RITA's capacity to create diversified and high-fidelity traffic simulations in several highly interactive highway scenarios. The experimental findings demonstrate that our produced RITA traffic flows exhibit all three key features, hence enhancing the completeness of driving strategy evaluation. Moreover, we showcase the possibility for further improvement of baseline strategies through online fine-tuning with RITA traffic flows.

Zehua Pei, Hui-Ling Zhen, Shixiong Kai et al.

Large Language Model (LLM) agents are increasingly deployed in environments that generate massive, dynamic contexts. However, a critical bottleneck remains: while agents have access to this context, their static prompts lack the mechanisms to manage it effectively, leading to recurring Corrective and Enhancement failures. To address this capability gap, we introduce \textbf{SCOPE} (Self-evolving Context Optimization via Prompt Evolution). SCOPE frames context management as an \textit{online optimization} problem, synthesizing guidelines from execution traces to automatically evolve the agent's prompt. We propose a Dual-Stream mechanism that balances tactical specificity (resolving immediate errors) with strategic generality (evolving long-term principles). Furthermore, we introduce Perspective-Driven Exploration to maximize strategy coverage, increasing the likelihood that the agent has the correct strategy for any given task. Experiments on the HLE benchmark show that SCOPE improves task success rates from 14.23\% to 38.64\% without human intervention. We make our code publicly available at https://github.com/JarvisPei/SCOPE.

Wenhao Wu, Zhentao Tang, Yafu Li et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit high reasoning capacity in medical question-answering, but their tendency to produce hallucinations and outdated knowledge poses critical risks in healthcare fields. While Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) mitigates these issues, existing methods rely on noisy token-level signals and lack the multi-round refinement required for complex reasoning. In the paper, we propose **MA-RAG** (**M**ulti-Round **A**gentic RAG), a framework that facilitates test-time scaling for complex medical reasoning by iteratively evolving both external evidence and internal reasoning history within an agentic refinement loop. At each round, the agent transforms semantic **conflict** among candidate responses into actionable queries to retrieve external evidence, while optimizing history reasoning traces to mitigate long-context degradation. MA-RAG extends the *self-consistency* principle by leveraging the lack of consistency as a proactive signal for multi-round agentic reasoning and retrieval, and mirrors a *boosting* mechanism that iteratively minimizes the residual error toward a stable, high-fidelity medical **consensus**. Extensive evaluations across 7 medical Q&A benchmarks show that MA-RAG consistently surpasses competitive inference-time scaling and RAG baselines, delivering **substantial +6.8 points** on average accuracy over the backbone model. Our code is available at [this url](https://github.com/NJU-RL/MA-RAG).

Yunqi Shi, Xi Lin, Zhiang Wang et al.

This work introduces the Re$^{\text{2}}$MaP method, which generates expert-quality macro placements through recursively prototyping and packing tree-based relocating. We first perform multi-level macro grouping and PPA-aware cell clustering to produce a unified connection matrix that captures both wirelength and dataflow among macros and clusters. Next, we use DREAMPlace to build a mixed-size placement prototype and obtain reference positions for each macro and cluster. Based on this prototype, we introduce ABPlace, an angle-based analytical method that optimizes macro positions on an ellipse to distribute macros uniformly near chip periphery, while optimizing wirelength and dataflow. A packing tree-based relocating procedure is then designed to jointly adjust the locations of macro groups and the macros within each group, by optimizing an expertise-inspired cost function that captures various design constraints through evolutionary search. Re$^{\text{2}}$MaP repeats the above process: Only a subset of macro groups are positioned in each iteration, and the remaining macros are deferred to the next iteration to improve the prototype's accuracy. Using a well-established backend flow with sufficient timing optimizations, Re$^{\text{2}}$MaP achieves up to 22.22% (average 10.26%) improvement in worst negative slack (WNS) and up to 97.91% (average 33.97%) improvement in total negative slack (TNS) compared to the state-of-the-art academic placer Hier-RTLMP. It also ranks higher on WNS, TNS, power, design rule check (DRC) violations, and runtime than the conference version ReMaP, across seven tested cases. Our code is available at https://github.com/lamda-bbo/Re2MaP.

Zhihai Wang, Zijie Geng, Zhaojie Tu et al.

The increasing complexity of modern very-large-scale integration (VLSI) design highlights the significance of Electronic Design Automation (EDA) technologies. Chip placement is a critical step in the EDA workflow, which positions chip modules on the canvas with the goal of optimizing performance, power, and area (PPA) metrics of final chip designs. Recent advances have demonstrated the great potential of AI-based algorithms in enhancing chip placement. However, due to the lengthy workflow of chip design, the evaluations of these algorithms often focus on intermediate surrogate metrics, which are easy to compute but frequently reveal a substantial misalignment with the end-to-end performance (i.e., the final design PPA). To address this challenge, we introduce ChiPBench, which can effectively facilitate research in chip placement within the AI community. ChiPBench is a comprehensive benchmark specifically designed to evaluate the effectiveness of existing AI-based chip placement algorithms in improving final design PPA metrics. Specifically, we have gathered 20 circuits from various domains (e.g., CPU, GPU, and microcontrollers). These designs are compiled by executing the workflow from the verilog source code, which preserves necessary physical implementation kits, enabling evaluations for the placement algorithms on their impacts on the final design PPA. We executed six state-of-the-art AI-based chip placement algorithms on these designs and plugged the results of each single-point algorithm into the physical implementation workflow to obtain the final PPA results. Experimental results show that even if intermediate metric of a single-point algorithm is dominant, while the final PPA results are unsatisfactory. We believe that our benchmark will serve as an effective evaluation framework to bridge the gap between academia and industry.

Ruizhe Zhong, Xingbo Du, Shixiong Kai et al.

Driven by Moore's Law, the complexity and scale of modern chip design are increasing rapidly. Electronic Design Automation (EDA) has been widely applied to address the challenges encountered in the full chip design process. However, the evolution of very large-scale integrated circuits has made chip design time-consuming and resource-intensive, requiring substantial prior expert knowledge. Additionally, intermediate human control activities are crucial for seeking optimal solutions. In system design stage, circuits are usually represented with Hardware Description Language (HDL) as a textual format. Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated their capability in context understanding, logic reasoning and answer generation. Since circuit can be represented with HDL in a textual format, it is reasonable to question whether LLMs can be leveraged in the EDA field to achieve fully automated chip design and generate circuits with improved power, performance, and area (PPA). In this paper, we present a systematic study on the application of LLMs in the EDA field, categorizing it into the following cases: 1) assistant chatbot, 2) HDL and script generation, and 3) HDL verification and analysis. Additionally, we highlight the future research direction, focusing on applying LLMs in logic synthesis, physical design, multi-modal feature extraction and alignment of circuits. We collect relevant papers up-to-date in this field via the following link: https://github.com/Thinklab-SJTU/Awesome-LLM4EDA.

Ruizhe Zhong, Junjie Ye, Zhentao Tang et al.

Pre-routing timing prediction has been recently studied for evaluating the quality of a candidate cell placement in chip design. It involves directly estimating the timing metrics for both pin-level (slack, slew) and edge-level (net delay, cell delay), without time-consuming routing. However, it often suffers from signal decay and error accumulation due to the long timing paths in large-scale industrial circuits. To address these challenges, we propose a two-stage approach. First, we propose global circuit training to pre-train a graph auto-encoder that learns the global graph embedding from circuit netlist. Second, we use a novel node updating scheme for message passing on GCN, following the topological sorting sequence of the learned graph embedding and circuit graph. This scheme residually models the local time delay between two adjacent pins in the updating sequence, and extracts the lookup table information inside each cell via a new attention mechanism. To handle large-scale circuits efficiently, we introduce an order preserving partition scheme that reduces memory consumption while maintaining the topological dependencies. Experiments on 21 real world circuits achieve a new SOTA R2 of 0.93 for slack prediction, which is significantly surpasses 0.59 by previous SOTA method. Code will be available at: https://github.com/Thinklab-SJTU/EDA-AI.

Ke Xue, Ruo-Tong Chen, Xi Lin et al.

In modern chip design, placement aims at placing millions of circuit modules, which is an essential step that significantly influences power, performance, and area (PPA) metrics. Recently, reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a promising technique for improving placement quality, especially macro placement. However, current RL-based placement methods suffer from long training times, low generalization ability, and inability to guarantee PPA results. A key issue lies in the problem formulation, i.e., using RL to place from scratch, which results in limits useful information and inaccurate rewards during the training process. In this work, we propose an approach that utilizes RL for the refinement stage, which allows the RL policy to learn how to adjust existing placement layouts, thereby receiving sufficient information for the policy to act and obtain relatively dense and precise rewards. Additionally, we introduce the concept of regularity during training, which is considered an important metric in the chip design industry but is often overlooked in current RL placement methods. We evaluate our approach on the ISPD 2005 and ICCAD 2015 benchmark, comparing the global half-perimeter wirelength and regularity of our proposed method against several competitive approaches. Besides, we test the PPA performance using commercial software, showing that RL as a regulator can achieve significant PPA improvements. Our RL regulator can fine-tune placements from any method and enhance their quality. Our work opens up new possibilities for the application of RL in placement, providing a more effective and efficient approach to optimizing chip design. Our code is available at \url{https://github.com/lamda-bbo/macro-regulator}.

Zhentao Tang, Yuqi Cui, Shixiong Kai et al.

Expert-level scientific reasoning remains challenging for large language models, particularly on benchmarks such as Humanity's Last Exam (HLE), where rigid tool pipelines, brittle multi-agent coordination, and inefficient test-time scaling often limit performance. We introduce ReThinker, a confidence-aware agentic framework that orchestrates retrieval, tool use, and multi-agent reasoning through a stage-wise Solver-Critic-Selector architecture. Rather than following a fixed pipeline, ReThinker dynamically allocates computation based on model confidence, enabling adaptive tool invocation, guided multi-dimensional reflection, and robust confidence-weighted selection. To support scalable training without human annotation, we further propose a reverse data synthesis pipeline and an adaptive trajectory recycling strategy that transform successful reasoning traces into high-quality supervision. Experiments on HLE, GAIA, and XBench demonstrate that ReThinker consistently outperforms state-of-the-art foundation models with tools and existing deep research systems, achieving state-of-the-art results on expert-level reasoning tasks.

Yunqi Shi, Siyuan Xu, Shixiong Kai et al.

Timing optimization during the global placement of integrated circuits has been a significant focus for decades, yet it remains a complex, unresolved issue. Recent analytical methods typically use pin-level timing information to adjust net weights, which is fast and simple but neglects the path-based nature of the timing graph. The existing path-based methods, however, cannot balance the accuracy and efficiency due to the exponential growth of number of critical paths. In this work, we propose a GPU-accelerated timing-driven global placement framework, integrating accurate path-level information into the efficient DREAMPlace infrastructure. It optimizes the fine-grained pin-to-pin attraction objective and is facilitated by efficient critical path extraction. We also design a quadratic distance loss function specifically to align with the RC timing model. Experimental results demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms the current leading timing-driven placers, achieving an average improvement of 40.5% in total negative slack (TNS) and 8.3% in worst negative slack (WNS), as well as an improvement in half-perimeter wirelength (HPWL).

Ke Xue, Xi Lin, Yunqi Shi et al.

Placement is crucial in the physical design, as it greatly affects power, performance, and area metrics. Recent advancements in analytical methods, such as DREAMPlace, have demonstrated impressive performance in global placement. However, DREAMPlace has some limitations, e.g., may not guarantee legalizable placements under the same settings, leading to fragile and unpredictable results. This paper highlights the main issue as being stuck in local optima, and proposes a hybrid optimization framework to efficiently escape the local optima, by perturbing the placement result iteratively. The proposed framework achieves significant improvements compared to state-of-the-art methods on two popular benchmarks.

Saurabh Bodhe, Zhanguang Zhang, Atia Hamidizadeh et al.

Pre-routing slack prediction remains a critical area of research in Electronic Design Automation (EDA). Despite numerous machine learning-based approaches targeting this task, there is still a lack of a truly end-to-end framework that engineers can use to obtain TNS/WNS metrics from raw circuit data at the placement stage. Existing works have demonstrated effectiveness in Arrival Time (AT) prediction but lack a mechanism for Required Arrival Time (RAT) prediction, which is essential for slack prediction and obtaining TNS/WNS metrics. In this work, we propose E2ESlack, an end-to-end graph-based framework for pre-routing slack prediction. The framework includes a TimingParser that supports DEF, SDF and LIB files for feature extraction and graph construction, an arrival time prediction model and a fast RAT estimation module. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work capable of predicting path-level slacks at the pre-routing stage. We perform extensive experiments and demonstrate that our proposed RAT estimation method outperforms the SOTA ML-based prediction method and also pre-routing STA tool. Additionally, the proposed E2ESlack framework achieves TNS/WNS values comparable to post-routing STA results while saving up to 23x runtime.

Yihong Tang, Kehai Chen, Liang Yue et al.

With the rise of large language models (LLMs), LLM agents capable of autonomous reasoning, planning, and executing complex tasks have become a frontier in artificial intelligence. However, how to translate the research on general agents into productivity that drives industry transformations remains a significant challenge. To address this, this paper systematically reviews the technologies, applications, and evaluation methods of industry agents based on LLMs. Using an industry agent capability maturity framework, it outlines the evolution of agents in industry applications, from "process execution systems" to "adaptive social systems." First, we examine the three key technological pillars that support the advancement of agent capabilities: Memory, Planning, and Tool Use. We discuss how these technologies evolve from supporting simple tasks in their early forms to enabling complex autonomous systems and collective intelligence in more advanced forms. Then, we provide an overview of the application of industry agents in real-world domains such as digital engineering, scientific discovery, embodied intelligence, collaborative business execution, and complex system simulation. Additionally, this paper reviews the evaluation benchmarks and methods for both fundamental and specialized capabilities, identifying the challenges existing evaluation systems face regarding authenticity, safety, and industry specificity. Finally, we focus on the practical challenges faced by industry agents, exploring their capability boundaries, developmental potential, and governance issues in various scenarios, while providing insights into future directions. By combining technological evolution with industry practices, this review aims to clarify the current state and offer a clear roadmap and theoretical foundation for understanding and building the next generation of industry agents.

Zhexuan Xu, Kexin Zhou, Jie Wang et al.

Floorplanning is a critical step in VLSI physical design, increasingly complicated by modern constraints such as fixed-outline requirements, whitespace removal, and the presence of pre-placed modules. In addition, the assignment of pins on module boundaries significantly impacts the performance of subsequent stages, including detailed placement and routing. However, traditional floorplanners often overlook pin assignment with modern constraints during the floorplanning stage. In this work, we introduce Piano, a floorplanning framework that simultaneously optimizes module placement and pin assignment under multiple constraints. Specifically, we construct a graph based on the geometric relationships among modules and their netlist connections, then iteratively search for shortest paths to determine pin assignments. This graph-based method also enables accurate evaluation of feedthrough and unplaced pins, thereby guiding overall layout quality. To further improve the design, we adopt a whitespace removal strategy and employ three local optimizers to enhance layout metrics under multi-constraint scenarios. Experimental results on widely used benchmark circuits demonstrate that Piano achieves an average 6.81% reduction in HPWL, a 13.39% decrease in feedthrough wirelength, a 16.36% reduction in the number of feedthrough modules, and a 21.21% drop in unplaced pins, while maintaining zero whitespace.