AgenticPD: A Stage-Aware Agentic Framework for Physical Design QoR Optimization

Physical design quality-of-results~(QoR) optimization is hard and expensive. Choices made at one stage can help or hurt later stages. Each evaluation requires a costly EDA run through the full flow. While existing methods still treat optimization as flat parameter tuning or a LLM-based script generation task, we present AgenticPD, a stage-aware agentic framework for physical design QoR optimization. Instead of re-running the full flow after every trial, AgenticPD is organized around the stage boundaries of the physical design flow, where a Judge Agent navigates the search and stage-specialized agents make local decisions within their own stage using stage-local tools. Additionally, the agent harness in AgenticPD provides structured observations, execution history, and agent context management. As a result, the system can branch from prior intermediate states and reuse checkpoints to continue the optimization procedure, and every candidate is evaluated at the post-route signoff. Across these baselines, AgenticPD achieves strong post-route timing while remaining competitive in power and area.

A$^{2}$utoLPBench: An Auto-Generated, Agent-Friendly LP Benchmark via Inverse-KKT Construction

Most LP-from-text benchmarks are static datasets of word problems written and labeled by hand. Once such a dataset is released, its size is fixed, its difficulty is fixed, and every problem can leak into the training data of future LLMs. We present \textbf{A$^{2}$utoLPBench}, a benchmark for testing LLM-driven agents on linear programming problems written in plain text. We first pick a feasible point and dual, then write down a problem for which that point is optimal and the objective value is known. The answer is known by construction, with no solver call and no human annotator. The evaluation environment bundles a reference solver-critic baseline and a Docker image whose usage instructions are written for an LLM-driven agent to read. With these in place, any agent can run the benchmark and get a calibrated score with one command. Because the benchmark is a generator rather than a fixed dataset, it has properties no fixed dataset can match: an unlimited supply of fresh problems, a difficulty knob set by $(n,m)$, ground-truth answers correct by construction, low LLM-side cost per problem relative to human authoring, repeatable scores across independent batches, and resistance to training-data leakage when fresh post-cutoff seed ranges are used.