EvolveGen: Algorithmic Level Hardware Model Checking Benchmark Generation through Reinforcement Learning

Progress in hardware model checking depends critically on high-quality benchmarks. However, the community faces a significant benchmark gap: existing suites are limited in number, often distributed only in representations such as BTOR2 without access to the originating register-transfer-level (RTL) designs, and biased toward extreme difficulty where instances are either trivial or intractable. These limitations hinder rigorous evaluation of new verification techniques and encourage overfitting of solver heuristics to a narrow set of problems. To address this, we introduce EvolveGen, a framework for generating hardware model checking benchmarks by combining reinforcement learning (RL) with high-level synthesis (HLS). Our approach operates at an algorithmic level of abstraction in which an RL agent learns to construct computation graphs. By compiling these graphs under different synthesis directives, we produce pairs of functionally equivalent but structurally distinct hardware designs, inducing challenging model checking instances. Solver runtime is used as the reward signal, enabling the agent to autonomously discover and generate small-but-hard instances that expose solver-specific weaknesses. Experiments show that EvolveGen efficiently creates a diverse benchmark set in standard formats (e.g., AIGER and BTOR2) and effectively reveals performance bottlenecks in state-of-the-art model checkers.

Mining Rules Incrementally over Large Knowledge Bases

Multiple web-scale Knowledge Bases, e.g., Freebase, YAGO, NELL, have been constructed using semi-supervised or unsupervised information extraction techniques and many of them, despite their large sizes, are continuously growing. Much research effort has been put into mining inference rules from knowledge bases. To address the task of rule mining over evolving web-scale knowledge bases, we propose a parallel incremental rule mining framework. Our approach is able to efficiently mine rules based on the relational model and apply updates to large knowledge bases; we propose an alternative metric that reduces computation complexity without compromising quality; we apply multiple optimization techniques that reduce runtime by more than 2 orders of magnitude. Experiments show that our approach efficiently scales to web-scale knowledge bases and saves over 90% time compared to the state-of-the-art batch rule mining system. We also apply our optimization techniques to the batch rule mining algorithm, reducing runtime by more than half compared to the state-of-the-art. To the best of our knowledge, our incremental rule mining system is the first that handles updates to web-scale knowledge bases.