Automatic Harness Evolution for Hardware Design Verification: Can LLMs Consolidate Gains Across Discovered Harnesses?

arXiv:2609.28908 · cs.SE, cs.LG · Submitted 2026-09-24 · Read on arXiv

cs.SE, cs.LG

Submitted: 2026-09-24

Updated: 2026-09-24

Terminology

• Benchmark — 32× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Verification — 20× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Trace — 14× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Verifier — 12× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Agent Harness — 3× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Robustness — 3× in this paper · explained in 5 episodes
• Agentic System — 2× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Calibration — 2× in this paper · explained in 7 episodes
• Generalization — 2× in this paper · explained in 13 episodes
• AI Agents — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Adaptation — 1× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Aggregation — 1× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Grounding — 1× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Iterative Refinement — 1× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Reinforcement Learning — 1× in this paper · explained in 4 episodes

Sources

• ChipNeMo: Domain-Adapted LLMs for Chip Design
• Revisiting VerilogEval: A Year of Improvements in Large-Language Models for Hardware Code Generation
• Comprehensive Verilog Design Problems: A Next-Generation Benchmark Dataset for Evaluating Large Language Models and Agents on RTL Design and Verification
• DSPy: Compiling Declarative Language Model Calls into Self-Improving Pipelines
• GEPA: Reflective Prompt Evolution Can Outperform Reinforcement Learning
• Automated Design of Agentic Systems
• AFlow: Automating Agentic Workflow Generation
• Meta-Harness: End-to-End Optimization of Model Harnesses
• Self-Harness: Harnesses That Improve Themselves
• Recursive Harness Self-Improvement
• EvolveNet: Collaborative Harness Evolution for Agent Self-Improvement
• Rethinking the Evaluation of Harness Evolution for Agents
• HarnessDev: Can LLMs Create and Evolve Their Own Agent Harness?
• Stop Comparing LLM Agents Without Disclosing the Harness
• Agentic Hardware Design as Repository-Level Code Evolution

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