Xi Wang

Runkai Li, Jia Xiong, Xiuyuan He et al.

High-Level Synthesis (HLS) improves IC development productivity by enabling hardware design from C-like languages. However, strict coding constraints and design-specific optimizations limit its widespread adoption. While recent efforts employ large language models (LLMs) to assist HLS design, they often struggle with synthesizability rules and directive semantics. To this end, we introduce ChatHLS, a multi-agent HLS design framework that leverages specialized LLMs for automated debugging and directive tuning. ChatHLS incorporates an adaptive error case expansion mechanism, combined with a reasoning-to-instruction analysis method to accurately diagnose HLS errors. To optimize hardware performance, it enables QoR-aware reasoning to learn the impact of HLS directives on the quality of results (QoR). Experimental results demonstrate that ChatHLS outperforms Gemini-3-pro with a 32.6% relative improvement in debugging, while achieving significant speedups across various HLS kernels and neural network accelerators. These results underscore the potential of ChatHLS for agile hardware development.

Xi Wang, Laurence Aitchison

The scaling of the optimal AdamW weight decay hyperparameter with model and dataset size is critical as we seek to build larger models, but is poorly understood. We show that weights learned by AdamW can be understood as an exponential moving average (EMA) of recent updates. This gives critical insights for how to set the weight decay in AdamW, and how the weight decay should scale with model and dataset size. In particular, the key hyperparameter for an exponential moving average is the EMA timescale. Intuitively, the EMA timescale can be understood as the number of recent iterations the EMA averages over. We find that the optimal timescale, measured in epochs, is roughly constant as we change model and dataset size. Moreover, given a learning rate, there is a one-to-one mapping from the EMA timescale to the weight decay hyperparameter. Thus, if the optimal EMA timescale is constant, that implies that as the dataset size increases, the optimal weight decay should fall and as the model size increases, the optimal weight decay should increase (if we follow the muP recommendation for scaling the learning rate). We validate these scaling rules on ResNet-18 and Vision Transformers trained on CIFAR-10 and ImageNet, and on NanoGPT pre-training on OpenWebText. Finally, we found that as training progresses, muP's learning rate scaling breaks down for AdamW unless weight decay is scaled appropriately.