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Received β€” 8 April 2026 ⏭ cs.AI, q-bio.NC updates on arXiv.org

From Concept to Practice: an Automated LLM-aided UVM Machine for RTL Verification

arXiv:2504.19959v4 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Verification presents a major bottleneck in Integrated Circuit (IC) development, consuming nearly 70% of the total development effort. While the Universal Verification Methodology (UVM) is widely used in industry to improve verification efficiency through structured and reusable testbenches, constructing these testbenches and generating sufficient stimuli remain challenging. These challenges arise from the considerable manual coding effort required, repetitive manual execution of multiple EDA tools, and the need for in-depth domain expertise to navigate complex designs.Here, we present UVM^2, an automated verification framework that leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate UVM testbenches and iteratively refine them using coverage feedback, significantly reducing manual effort while maintaining rigorous verification standards.To evaluate UVM^2, we introduce a benchmark suite comprising Register Transfer Level (RTL) designs of up to 1.6K lines of code.The results show that UVM^2 reduces testbench setup time by up to UVM^2 compared to experienced engineers, and achieve average code and function coverage of 87.44% and 89.58%, outperforming state-of-the-art solutions by 20.96% and 23.51%, respectively.

HISA: Efficient Hierarchical Indexing for Fine-Grained Sparse Attention

arXiv:2603.28458v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Token-level sparse attention mechanisms, exemplified by DeepSeek Sparse Attention (DSA), achieve fine-grained key selection by scoring every historical key for each query through a lightweight indexer, then computing attention only on the selected subset. While the downstream sparse attention itself scales favorably, the indexer must still scan the entire prefix for every query, introducing an per-layer bottleneck that grows prohibitively with context length. We propose HISA (Hierarchical Indexed Sparse Attention), a plug-and-play replacement for the indexer that rewrites the search path from a flat token scan into a two-stage hierarchical procedure: (1) a block-level coarse filtering stage that scores pooled block representations to discard irrelevant regions, followed by (2) a token-level refinement stage that applies the original indexer exclusively within the retained candidate blocks. HISA preserves the identical token-level top-sparse pattern consumed by the downstream Sparse MLA operator and requires no additional training. On kernel-level benchmarks, HISA achieves up to speedup at 64K context. On Needle-in-a-Haystack and LongBench, we directly replace the indexer in DeepSeek-V3.2 and GLM-5 with our HISA indexer, without any finetuning. HISA closely matches the original DSA in quality, while substantially outperforming block-sparse baselines.
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