Machine Learning VLSI CAD Experiments Should Consider Atomic Data Groups
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Machine learning (ML) has proved useful across a wide range of applications in the very-large-scale integration computer-aided design (VLSI CAD) domain. To avoid overestimating ML models’ generalization capabilities for real-world deployments, best practices utilize realistic data and avoid test set information leakage during ML model preparation. In this paper we identify a further consideration, atomic data groups, which are sets of very highly correlated data that may also lead to such overestimation if not accounted for in train-test splits during model evaluation. We investigate the potential impact of atomic data groups in experimental design through a case study of field-programmable gate array (FPGA) routing. Our investigations show that model performance in deployment is overestimated by 38% in this case study when atomic data groups are ignored. We hope that these results motivate other ML CAD practitioners to be critical of their train-test splits and identify when atomic data groups are relevant to their model evaluations.CCS Concepts• Hardware → Reconfigurable logic and FPGAs; Best practices for EDA; • Computing methodologies → Machine learning.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".