When Forgetting Builds Reliability: LLM Unlearning for Reliable Hardware Code Generation

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Liang, Yiwen, Li, Qiufeng, Wang, Shikai, Cao, Weidong
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Liang, Yiwen
Li, Qiufeng
Wang, Shikai
Cao, Weidong
author_facet Liang, Yiwen
Li, Qiufeng
Wang, Shikai
Cao, Weidong
contents Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown strong potential in accelerating digital hardware design through automated code generation. Yet, ensuring their reliability remains a critical challenge, as existing LLMs trained on massive heterogeneous datasets often exhibit problematic memorization of proprietary intellectual property (IP), contaminated benchmarks, and unsafe coding patterns. To mitigate these risks, we propose a novel unlearning framework tailored for LLM-based hardware code generation. Our method combines (i) a syntax-preserving unlearning strategy that safeguards the structural integrity of hardware code during forgetting, and (ii) a fine-grained floor-aware selective loss that enables precise and efficient removal of problematic knowledge. This integration achieves effective unlearning without degrading LLM code generation capabilities. Extensive experiments show that our framework supports forget sets up to 3x larger, typically requiring only a single training epoch, while preserving both syntactic correctness and functional integrity of register-transfer level (RTL) codes. Our work paves an avenue towards reliable LLM-assisted hardware design.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_05341
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle When Forgetting Builds Reliability: LLM Unlearning for Reliable Hardware Code Generation
Liang, Yiwen
Li, Qiufeng
Wang, Shikai
Cao, Weidong
Machine Learning
Hardware Architecture
Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown strong potential in accelerating digital hardware design through automated code generation. Yet, ensuring their reliability remains a critical challenge, as existing LLMs trained on massive heterogeneous datasets often exhibit problematic memorization of proprietary intellectual property (IP), contaminated benchmarks, and unsafe coding patterns. To mitigate these risks, we propose a novel unlearning framework tailored for LLM-based hardware code generation. Our method combines (i) a syntax-preserving unlearning strategy that safeguards the structural integrity of hardware code during forgetting, and (ii) a fine-grained floor-aware selective loss that enables precise and efficient removal of problematic knowledge. This integration achieves effective unlearning without degrading LLM code generation capabilities. Extensive experiments show that our framework supports forget sets up to 3x larger, typically requiring only a single training epoch, while preserving both syntactic correctness and functional integrity of register-transfer level (RTL) codes. Our work paves an avenue towards reliable LLM-assisted hardware design.
title When Forgetting Builds Reliability: LLM Unlearning for Reliable Hardware Code Generation
topic Machine Learning
Hardware Architecture
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.05341