English

RTLSeek: Boosting the LLM-Based RTL Generation with Multi-Stage Diversity-Oriented Reinforcement Learning

Hardware Architecture 2026-03-31 v1 Machine Learning

Abstract

Register Transfer Level (RTL) design translates high-level specifications into hardware using HDLs such as Verilog. Although LLM-based RTL generation is promising, the scarcity of functionally verifiable high-quality data limits both accuracy and diversity. Existing post-training typically produces a single HDL implementation per specification, lacking awareness of RTL variations needed for different design goals. We propose RTLSeek, a post-training paradigm that applies rule-based Diversity-Oriented Reinforcement Learning to improve RTL correctness and diversity. Our Diversity-Centric Multi-Objective Reward Scheduling integrates expert knowledge with EDA feedback, and a three-stage framework maximizes the utility of limited data. Experiments on the RTLLM benchmark show that RTLSeek surpasses prior methods, with ablation results confirming that encouraging broader design-space exploration improves RTL quality and achieves the principle of "the more generated, the better results." Implementation framework, including the dataset, source code, and model weights, is shown at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/DAC2026ID71-ACB4/.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2603.27630,
  title  = {RTLSeek: Boosting the LLM-Based RTL Generation with Multi-Stage Diversity-Oriented Reinforcement Learning},
  author = {Xinyu Zhang and Zhiteng Chao and Yonghao Wang and Bin Sun and Tianyun Ma and Tianmeng Yang and Jianan Mu and Jing Justin Ye and Huawei Li},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.27630},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

8 pages, 6 figures

R2 v1 2026-07-01T11:42:48.654Z