An Iteratively-refined Dataset for High-Level Synthesis Functional Verification through LLM-Aided Bug Injection

This paper explores the application of Large Language Models (LLMs) in the domain of High-Level Synthesis (HLS) for hardware design and verification, focusing on functional verification challenges. The scarcity of open-source HLS codebases, especially those containing bugs, poses a significant challenge, as LLMs require extensive datasets for efficient fine-tuning and evaluation. To tackle this, we introduce an innovative bug injection methodology working with a new dataset that we curated from a wide range of open-source HLS benchmark suites. This dataset features over 1,500 designs, with both the version injected with bugs and the corresponding bug-free version. Our bug injection method synergizes In-Context Learning (ICL) with Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), and Chain of Thought (CoT). This approach significantly boosts the dataset’s overall validity rate for single-bug injections. We demonstrate our solution quality using GPT-4 Turbo for injecting either logic bugs or non-ideal pragmas (compiler directives) into HLS designs. For logic bugs, we achieve an 84.8% ratio for valid injection attempts. Furthermore, our approach maintains an 88.0% dataset validity rate (the valid bug injection rate). In addition, we also evaluate the quality of HLS pragma injections (focusing on non-ideal pragmas), and achieve a 74.0% attempt and an 87.9% valid injection ratio. Compared to brute-force prompting, our strategy yields a 20.4% and a 54.0% validity improvement for the bug and non-ideal pragma injection, respectively. The Chrysalis dataset is accessible at https://github.com/UIUC-ChenLab/Chrysalis-HLS.