Evidence-Guided Repository-Level RTL Repair

Abstract

Repository-level RTL repair must localize a failure that spans files, modules, and clock cycles, then propagate the fix consistently. Existing methods reason over source code, which reveals possible behaviors but not the failed execution, and cannot tell whether a local fix was propagated consistently. We therefore present an evidence-guided framework with three modules. Failure grounding converts a problem statement into a reproduced failing run and a failure anchor. Waveform-guided localization uses a localization toolbox to narrow the observed violation into a candidate mechanism and an evidence trail. Consistency-aware repair and validation then expand that seed into a coordinated patch and replay the same scenario to check that the violation disappears. We conducted experiments on HWE-Bench and achieved better performance than the baseline.