RefEvo: Agentic Design with Co-Evolutionary Verification for Agile Reference Model Generation

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Zhang, Yifan, Ye, Jianmin, Yang, Jiahao, Wang, Xi
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866913064895381504
author Zhang, Yifan
Ye, Jianmin
Yang, Jiahao
Wang, Xi
author_facet Zhang, Yifan
Ye, Jianmin
Yang, Jiahao
Wang, Xi
contents As the complexity of System-on-Chip (SoC) designs grows, the shift-left paradigm necessitates the rapid development of high-fidelity reference models (typically written in SystemC) for early architecture exploration and verification. While Large Language Models (LLMs) show promise in code generation, their application to hardware modeling faces unique challenges: (1) Rigid, static workflows fail to adapt to varying design complexity, causing inefficiency; (2) Context window overflow in multi-turn interactions leads to catastrophic forgetting of critical specifications; and (3) the Coupled Validation Failure problem--where generated Testbenches (TBs) incorrectly validate flawed models due to correlated hallucinations--severely undermines reliability. To address these limitations, we introduce RefEvo, a dynamic multi-agent framework designed for agile and reliable reference modeling. RefEvo features three key innovations: (1) A Dynamic Design Planner that autonomously decomposes design specifications and constructs tailored execution workflows based on semantic complexity; (2) A Co-Evolutionary Verification Mechanism, which employs a Dialectical Arbiter to simultaneously rectify the model and verification logic against the specification (Spec) oracle, effectively mitigating false positives; and (3) A Spec Anchoring Strategy for lossless context compression. Evaluated on a diverse benchmark of 20 hardware modules, RefEvo achieves a 95% pass rate, outperforming static baselines by a large margin. Furthermore, our context optimization reduces token consumption by an average of 71.04%, achieving absolute savings of over 70,000 tokens per session for complex designs while maintaining 100% specification recall.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_24218
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle RefEvo: Agentic Design with Co-Evolutionary Verification for Agile Reference Model Generation
Zhang, Yifan
Ye, Jianmin
Yang, Jiahao
Wang, Xi
Software Engineering
Artificial Intelligence
As the complexity of System-on-Chip (SoC) designs grows, the shift-left paradigm necessitates the rapid development of high-fidelity reference models (typically written in SystemC) for early architecture exploration and verification. While Large Language Models (LLMs) show promise in code generation, their application to hardware modeling faces unique challenges: (1) Rigid, static workflows fail to adapt to varying design complexity, causing inefficiency; (2) Context window overflow in multi-turn interactions leads to catastrophic forgetting of critical specifications; and (3) the Coupled Validation Failure problem--where generated Testbenches (TBs) incorrectly validate flawed models due to correlated hallucinations--severely undermines reliability. To address these limitations, we introduce RefEvo, a dynamic multi-agent framework designed for agile and reliable reference modeling. RefEvo features three key innovations: (1) A Dynamic Design Planner that autonomously decomposes design specifications and constructs tailored execution workflows based on semantic complexity; (2) A Co-Evolutionary Verification Mechanism, which employs a Dialectical Arbiter to simultaneously rectify the model and verification logic against the specification (Spec) oracle, effectively mitigating false positives; and (3) A Spec Anchoring Strategy for lossless context compression. Evaluated on a diverse benchmark of 20 hardware modules, RefEvo achieves a 95% pass rate, outperforming static baselines by a large margin. Furthermore, our context optimization reduces token consumption by an average of 71.04%, achieving absolute savings of over 70,000 tokens per session for complex designs while maintaining 100% specification recall.
title RefEvo: Agentic Design with Co-Evolutionary Verification for Agile Reference Model Generation
topic Software Engineering
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.24218