arxivcs.SEcs.AI2026-07-18
CLOSER-Bench: Evaluating Budgeted Cross-Stage Design Closure for Hardware Agents
Peilong Zhou, Zhirong Chen, Cangyuan Li, Haoyu Gao, Kaiyan Chang, Ziming Qu, et al.
Hardware engineering exposes coding agents to a form of long-horizon work that is difficult to capture with pass-at-k: progress is continuous, tool feedback is delayed and heterogeneous, and a backend failure may require revising RTL rather than tuning another physical-design par…