Shao Su

Jianmin Ye, Tianyang Liu, Qi Tian et al.

As the complexity of integrated circuit designs continues to escalate, functional verification becomes increasingly challenging. Reference models, critical for accelerating the verification process, are themselves becoming more intricate and time-consuming to develop. Despite the promise shown by large language models (LLMs) in code programming, effectively generating complex reference models remains a significant hurdle. Therefore, we introduce ChatModel, an LLM-aided agile reference model generation and verification platform. ChatModel streamlines the transition from design specifications to fully functional reference models by integrating design standardization and hierarchical agile modeling. Employing a building-block generation strategy, it not only enhances the design capabilities of LLMs for reference models but also significantly boosts verification efficiency. We evaluated ChatModel on 300 designs of varying complexity, demonstrating substantial improvements in both efficiency and quality of reference model generation. ChatModel achieved a peak performance improvement of 58.99% compared to alternative methods, with notable enhancements in generation stability, and delivered a 9.18x increase in its capacity to produce reference model designs. Moreover, ChatModel accelerates the reference model design and validation cycles by an average of 7.11x over traditional manual approaches. These results highlight the potential of ChatModel to significantly advance the automation of reference model generation and validation.

Yiping Wang, Shao-Rong Su, Zhiyuan Zeng et al.

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have enabled breakthroughs in mathematical discovery, exemplified by AlphaEvolve, a closed-source system that evolves programs to improve bounds on open problems. However, it relies on ensembles of frontier LLMs to achieve new bounds and is a pure inference system that models cannot internalize the evolving strategies. We introduce ThetaEvolve, an open-source framework that simplifies and extends AlphaEvolve to efficiently scale both in-context learning and Reinforcement Learning (RL) at test time, allowing models to continually learn from their experiences in improving open optimization problems. ThetaEvolve features a single LLM, a large program database for enhanced exploration, batch sampling for higher throughput, lazy penalties to discourage stagnant outputs, and optional reward shaping for stable training signals, etc. ThetaEvolve is the first evolving framework that enable a small open-source model, like DeepSeek-R1-0528-Qwen3-8B, to achieve new best-known bounds on open problems (circle packing and first auto-correlation inequality) mentioned in AlphaEvolve. Besides, across two models and four open tasks, we find that ThetaEvolve with RL at test-time consistently outperforms inference-only baselines, and the model indeed learns evolving capabilities, as the RL-trained checkpoints demonstrate faster progress and better final performance on both trained target task and other unseen tasks. We release our code publicly: https://github.com/ypwang61/ThetaEvolve