An Exploration of Agent Scaling for HLS Design Space Exploration (IBM)

A new technical paper, “Agent Factories for High Level Synthesis: How Far Can General-Purpose Coding Agents Go in Hardware Optimization?” was published by IBM.

Abstract

“We present an empirical study of how far general-purpose coding agents – without hardware-specific training – can optimize hardware designs from high-level algorithmic specifications. We introduce an agent factory, a two-stage pipeline that constructs and coordinates multiple autonomous optimization agents.
In Stage~1, the pipeline decomposes a design into sub-kernels, independently optimizes each using pragma and code-level transformations, and formulates an Integer Linear Program (ILP) to assemble globally promising configurations under an area constraint. In Stage~2, it launches N expert agents over the top ILP solutions, each exploring cross-function optimizations such as pragma recombination, loop fusion, and memory restructuring that are not captured by sub-kernel decomposition.
We evaluate the…