Heng Ping

Heng Ping, Peiyu Zhang, Zhenkun Wang et al.

Applying large language models (LLMs) to RTL code optimization for improved power, performance, and area (PPA) faces two key challenges: ensuring functional correctness of optimized designs despite LLM hallucination, and systematically prioritizing power reduction within the multi-objective PPA trade-off space. We propose POET (Power-Oriented Evolutionary Tuning), a framework that addresses both challenges. For functional correctness, POET introduces a differential-testing-based testbench generation pipeline that treats the original design as a functional oracle, using deterministic simulation to produce golden references and eliminating LLM hallucination from the verification process. For PPA optimization, POET employs an LLM-driven evolutionary mechanism with non-dominated sorting, power-first intra-level ranking, and proportional survivor selection to steer the search toward the low-power region of the Pareto front without manual weight tuning. Evaluated on the RTL-OPT benchmark across 40 diverse RTL designs, POET achieves 100% functional correctness, the best power on all 40 designs, and competitive area and delay improvements.

Anzhe Cheng, Shukai Duan, Shixuan Li et al.

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures expand model capacity by sparsely activating experts but face two core challenges: misalignment between router logits and each expert's internal structure leads to unstable routing and expert underutilization, and load imbalances create straggler bottlenecks. Standard solutions, such as auxiliary load-balancing losses, can reduce load disparities but often weaken expert specialization and hurt downstream performance. To address these issues, we propose ERMoE, a sparse MoE transformer that reparameterizes each expert in a learned orthonormal eigenbasis and replaces learned gating logits with an "Eigenbasis Score", defined as the cosine similarity between input features and an expert's basis. This content-aware routing ties token assignments directly to experts' representation spaces, stabilizing utilization and promoting interpretable specialization without sacrificing sparsity. Crucially, ERMoE removes the need for explicit balancing losses and avoids the interfering gradients they introduce. We show that ERMoE achieves state-of-the-art accuracy on ImageNet classification and cross-modal image-text retrieval benchmarks (e.g., COCO, Flickr30K), while naturally producing flatter expert load distributions. Moreover, a 3D MRI variant (ERMoE-ba) improves brain age prediction accuracy by more than 7\% and yields anatomically interpretable expert specializations. ERMoE thus introduces a new architectural principle for sparse expert models that directly addresses routing instabilities and enables improved performance with scalable, interpretable specialization.

Anzhe Cheng, Zhenkun Wang, Chenzhong Yin et al.

Backpropagation (BP) has been a successful optimization technique for deep learning models. However, its limitations, such as backward- and update-locking, and its biological implausibility, hinder the concurrent updating of layers and do not mimic the local learning processes observed in the human brain. To address these issues, recent research has suggested using local error signals to asynchronously train network blocks. However, this approach often involves extensive trial-and-error iterations to determine the best configuration for local training. This includes decisions on how to decouple network blocks and which auxiliary networks to use for each block. In our work, we introduce a novel BP-free approach: a block-wise BP-free (BWBPF) neural network that leverages local error signals to optimize distinct sub-neural networks separately, where the global loss is only responsible for updating the output layer. The local error signals used in the BP-free model can be computed in parallel, enabling a potential speed-up in the weight update process through parallel implementation. Our experimental results consistently show that this approach can identify transferable decoupled architectures for VGG and ResNet variations, outperforming models trained with end-to-end backpropagation and other state-of-the-art block-wise learning techniques on datasets such as CIFAR-10 and Tiny-ImageNet. The code is released at https://github.com/Belis0811/BWBPF.

Wei Yang, Shixuan Li, Heng Ping et al.

Multi-agent systems (MAS) can substantially extend the reasoning capacity of large language models (LLMs), yet most frameworks still aggregate agent outputs with majority voting. This heuristic discards the evidential structure of reasoning traces and is brittle under the confabulation consensus, where agents share correlated biases and converge on the same incorrect rationale. We introduce AgentAuditor, which replaces voting with a path search over a Reasoning Tree that explicitly represents agreements and divergences among agent traces. AgentAuditor resolves conflicts by comparing reasoning branches at critical divergence points, turning global adjudication into efficient, localized verification. We further propose Anti-Consensus Preference Optimization (ACPO), which trains the adjudicator on majority-failure cases and rewards evidence-based minority selections over popular errors. AgentAuditor is agnostic to MAS setting, and we find across 5 popular settings that it yields up to 5% absolute accuracy improvement over a majority vote, and up to 3% over using LLM-as-Judge.

Heng Ping, Peiyu Zhang, Shixuan Li et al.

LLM-based RTL code generation methods increasingly target both functional correctness and PPA quality, yet existing approaches universally decouple the two objectives, optimizing PPA only after correctness is fully achieved. Whether through sequential multi-agent pipelines, evolutionary search with binary correctness gates, or hierarchical reward dependencies, partially correct but architecturally promising candidates are systematically discarded. Moreover, existing methods reduce the multi-objective PPA space to a single scalar fitness, obscuring the trade-offs among area, delay, and power. To address these limitations, we propose COEVO, a co-evolutionary framework that unifies correctness and PPA optimization within a single evolutionary loop. COEVO formulates correctness as a continuous co-optimization dimension alongside area, delay, and power, enabled by an enhanced testbench that provides fine-grained scoring and detailed diagnostic feedback. An adaptive correctness gate with annealing allows PPA-promising but partially correct candidates to guide the search toward jointly optimal solutions. To preserve the full PPA trade-off structure, COEVO employs four-dimensional Pareto-based non-dominated sorting with configurable intra-level sorting, replacing scalar fitness without manual weight tuning. Evaluated on VerilogEval 2.0 and RTLLM 2.0, COEVO achieves 97.5\% and 94.5\% Pass@1 with GPT-5.4-mini, surpassing all agentic baselines across four LLM backbones, while attaining the best PPA on 43 out of 49 synthesizable RTLLM designs.

Heng Ping, Arijit Bhattacharjee, Peiyu Zhang et al.

Automation of Register Transfer Level (RTL) design can help developers meet increasing computational demands. Large Language Models (LLMs) show promise for Hardware Description Language (HDL) generation, but face challenges due to limited parametric knowledge and domain-specific constraints. While prompt engineering and fine-tuning have limitations in knowledge coverage and training costs, multi-agent architectures offer a training-free paradigm to enhance reasoning through collaborative generation. However, current multi-agent approaches suffer from two critical deficiencies: susceptibility to noise propagation and constrained reasoning space exploration. We propose VeriMoA, a training-free mixture-of-agents (MoA) framework with two synergistic innovations. First, a quality-guided caching mechanism to maintain all intermediate HDL outputs and enables quality-based ranking and selection across the entire generation process, encouraging knowledge accumulation over layers of reasoning. Second, a multi-path generation strategy that leverages C++ and Python as intermediate representations, decomposing specification-to-HDL translation into two-stage processes that exploit LLM fluency in high-resource languages while promoting solution diversity. Comprehensive experiments on VerilogEval 2.0 and RTLLM 2.0 benchmarks demonstrate that VeriMoA achieves 15--30% improvements in Pass@1 across diverse LLM backbones, especially enabling smaller models to match larger models and fine-tuned alternatives without requiring costly training.

Arijit Bhattacharjee, Heng Ping, Son Vu Le et al.

Generating high-performance CUDA kernels remains challenging due to the need to navigate a combinatorial space of low-level transformations under noisy and expensive hardware feedback. Although large language models can synthesize functionally correct CUDA code, achieving competitive performance requires systematic exploration and verification of optimization choices. We present OptiML, an end-to-end framework that maps either natural-language intent or input CUDA code to performance-optimized CUDA kernels by formulating kernel optimization as search under verification. OptiML consists of two decoupled stages. When the input is natural language, a Mixture-of-Thoughts generator (OptiML-G) acts as a proposal policy over kernel implementation strategies, producing an initial executable program. A search-based optimizer (OptiML-X) then refines either synthesized or user-provided kernels using Monte Carlo Tree Search over LLM-driven edits, guided by a hardware-aware reward derived from profiler feedback. Each candidate transformation is compiled, verified, and profiled with Nsight Compute, and evaluated by a composite objective that combines runtime with hardware bottleneck proxies and guardrails against regressions. We evaluate OptiML in both synthesis-and-optimize and optimization-only settings on a diverse suite of CUDA kernels. Results show that OptiML consistently discovers verified performance improvements over strong LLM baselines and produces interpretable optimization trajectories grounded in profiler evidence.

Heng Ping, Shixuan Li, Peiyu Zhang et al.

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in code generation tasks. However, when applied to hardware description languages (HDL), these models exhibit significant limitations due to data scarcity, resulting in hallucinations and incorrect code generation. To address these challenges, we propose HDLCoRe, a training-free framework that enhances LLMs' HDL generation capabilities through prompt engineering techniques and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). Our approach consists of two main components: (1) an HDL-aware Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting technique with self-verification that classifies tasks by complexity and type, incorporates domain-specific knowledge, and guides LLMs through step-by-step self-simulation for error correction; and (2) a two-stage heterogeneous RAG system that addresses formatting inconsistencies through key component extraction and efficiently retrieves relevant HDL examples through sequential filtering and re-ranking. HDLCoRe eliminates the need for model fine-tuning while substantially improving LLMs' HDL generation capabilities. Experimental results demonstrate that our framework achieves superior performance on the RTLLM2.0 benchmark, significantly reducing hallucinations and improving both syntactic and functional correctness.

Xiongye Xiao, Heng Ping, Chenyu Zhou et al.

In recent years, there has been increasing attention on the capabilities of large models, particularly in handling complex tasks that small-scale models are unable to perform. Notably, large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated ``intelligent'' abilities such as complex reasoning and abstract language comprehension, reflecting cognitive-like behaviors. However, current research on emergent abilities in large models predominantly focuses on the relationship between model performance and size, leaving a significant gap in the systematic quantitative analysis of the internal structures and mechanisms driving these emergent abilities. Drawing inspiration from neuroscience research on brain network structure and self-organization, we propose (i) a general network representation of large models, (ii) a new analytical framework, called Neuron-based Multifractal Analysis (NeuroMFA), for structural analysis, and (iii) a novel structure-based metric as a proxy for emergent abilities of large models. By linking structural features to the capabilities of large models, NeuroMFA provides a quantitative framework for analyzing emergent phenomena in large models. Our experiments show that the proposed method yields a comprehensive measure of network's evolving heterogeneity and organization, offering theoretical foundations and a new perspective for investigating emergent abilities in large models.

Shukai Duan, Nikos Kanakaris, Xiongye Xiao et al.

Code optimization is a challenging task requiring a substantial level of expertise from developers. Nonetheless, this level of human capacity is not sufficient considering the rapid evolution of new hardware architectures and software environments. In light of this, recent research proposes adopting machine learning and artificial intelligence techniques to automate the code optimization process. In this paper, we introduce PerfRL, an innovative framework designed to tackle the problem of code optimization. Our framework leverages the capabilities of small language models (SLMs) and reinforcement learning (RL), facilitating a system where SLMs can assimilate feedback from their environment during the fine-tuning phase, notably through unit tests. When benchmarked against existing models, PerfRL demonstrates superior efficiency in terms of speed and computational resource usage, attributed to its reduced need for training steps and its compatibility with SLMs. Furthermore, it substantially diminishes the risk of logical and syntactical errors. To evaluate our framework, we conduct experiments on the PIE dataset using a lightweight large language model (i.e., CodeT5) and a new reinforcement learning algorithm, namely RRHF. For evaluation purposes, we use a list of evaluation metrics related to optimization quality and speedup. The evaluation results show that our approach achieves similar or better results compared to state-of-the-art models using shorter training times and smaller pre-trained models.

Shukai Duan, Heng Ping, Nikos Kanakaris et al.

Computation graphs are Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAGs) where the nodes correspond to mathematical operations and are used widely as abstractions in optimizations of neural networks. The device placement problem aims to identify optimal allocations of those nodes to a set of (potentially heterogeneous) devices. Existing approaches rely on two types of architectures known as grouper-placer and encoder-placer, respectively. In this work, we bridge the gap between encoder-placer and grouper-placer techniques and propose a novel framework for the task of device placement, relying on smaller computation graphs extracted from the OpenVINO toolkit. The framework consists of five steps, including graph coarsening, node representation learning and policy optimization. It facilitates end-to-end training and takes into account the DAG nature of the computation graphs. We also propose a model variant, inspired by graph parsing networks and complex network analysis, enabling graph representation learning and jointed, personalized graph partitioning, using an unspecified number of groups. To train the entire framework, we use reinforcement learning using the execution time of the placement as a reward. We demonstrate the flexibility and effectiveness of our approach through multiple experiments with three benchmark models, namely Inception-V3, ResNet, and BERT. The robustness of the proposed framework is also highlighted through an ablation study. The suggested placements improve the inference speed for the benchmark models by up to 58.2% over CPU execution and by up to 60.24% compared to other commonly used baselines.

Nikos Kanakaris, Heng Ping, Xiongye Xiao et al.

Detecting organized political campaigns is of paramount importance in fighting against disinformation on social media. Existing approaches for the identification of such organized actions employ techniques mostly from network science, graph machine learning and natural language processing. Their ultimate goal is to analyze the relationships and interactions (e.g. re-posting) among users and the textual similarities of their posts. Despite their effectiveness in recognizing astroturf campaigns, these methods face significant challenges, notably the class imbalance in available training datasets. To mitigate this issue, recent methods usually resort to data augmentation or increasing the number of positive samples, which may not always be feasible or sufficient in real-world settings. Following a different path, in this paper, we propose a novel framework for identifying astroturf campaigns based solely on large language models (LLMs), introducing a Balanced Retrieval-Augmented Generation (Balanced RAG) component. Our approach first gives both textual information concerning the posts (in our case tweets) and the user interactions of the social network as input to a language model. Then, through prompt engineering and the proposed Balanced RAG method, it effectively detects coordinated disinformation campaigns on X (Twitter). The proposed framework does not require any training or fine-tuning of the language model. Instead, by strategically harnessing the strengths of prompt engineering and Balanced RAG, it facilitates LLMs to overcome the effects of class imbalance and effectively identify coordinated political campaigns. The experimental results demonstrate that by incorporating the proposed prompt engineering and Balanced RAG methods, our framework outperforms the traditional graph-based baselines, achieving 2x-3x improvements in terms of precision, recall and F1 scores.

Trung-Kien Nguyen, Heng Ping, Shixuan Li et al.

The growing interests and applications of graph learning in diverse domains have propelled the development of a unified model generalizing well across different graphs and tasks, known as the Graph Foundation Model (GFM). Existing research has leveraged text-attributed graphs (TAGs) to tackle the heterogeneity in node features among graphs. However, they primarily focus on homogeneous TAGs (HoTAGs), leaving heterogeneous TAGs (HeTAGs), where multiple types of nodes/edges reside, underexplored. To enhance the capabilities and applications of GFM, we introduce H$^2$GFM, a novel framework designed to generalize across both HoTAGs and HeTAGs. Our model projects diverse meta-relations among graphs under a unified textual space, and employs a context encoding to capture spatial and higher-order semantic relationships. To achieve robust node representations, we propose a novel context-adaptive graph transformer (CGT), effectively capturing information from both context neighbors and their relationships. Furthermore, we employ a mixture of CGT experts to capture the heterogeneity in structural patterns among graph types. Comprehensive experiments on a wide range of HoTAGs and HeTAGs as well as learning scenarios demonstrate the effectiveness of our model.

Anzhe Cheng, Chenzhong Yin, Yu Chang et al.

Low-resolution image segmentation is crucial in real-world applications such as robotics, augmented reality, and large-scale scene understanding, where high-resolution data is often unavailable due to computational constraints. To address this challenge, we propose MaskAttn-UNet, a novel segmentation framework that enhances the traditional U-Net architecture via a mask attention mechanism. Our model selectively emphasizes important regions while suppressing irrelevant backgrounds, thereby improving segmentation accuracy in cluttered and complex scenes. Unlike conventional U-Net variants, MaskAttn-UNet effectively balances local feature extraction with broader contextual awareness, making it particularly well-suited for low-resolution inputs. We evaluate our approach on three benchmark datasets with input images rescaled to 128x128 and demonstrate competitive performance across semantic, instance, and panoptic segmentation tasks. Our results show that MaskAttn-UNet achieves accuracy comparable to state-of-the-art methods at significantly lower computational cost than transformer-based models, making it an efficient and scalable solution for low-resolution segmentation in resource-constrained scenarios.