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DAPO: Design Structure-Aware Pass Ordering for HLS via Contrastive and Reinforcement Learning

Jinming Ge, Linfeng Du, Likith Anaparty, Shangkun Li, Tingyuan Liang, Afzal Ahmad, Vivek Chaturvedi, Sharad Sinha et al.

2026

Abstract

High-Level Synthesis (HLS) tools are widely adopted in FPGA-based domain-specific accelerator design. However, existing tools rely on fixed optimization strategies inherited from software compilations, limiting their effectiveness. Tailoring optimization strategies to specific designs requires deep semantic understanding, accurate hardware metric estimation, and advanced search algorithms - capabilities that current approaches lack.We propose DAPO, a design structure-aware pass ordering framework that extracts program semantics from control and data flow graphs, employs contrastive learning to generate rich embeddings, and leverages an analytical model for accurate hardware metric estimation. These components jointly guide a reinforcement learning agent to discover design-specific optimization strategies. Evaluations on standard HLS benchmarks demonstrate that our end-to-end flow delivers 1.67× speedup on pragma-free designs and a 2.36× speedup on designs with pragmas over Vitis HLS with comparable resource usage.

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