# BRIDGES: Bridging Graph Modality and Large Language Models within EDA Tasks

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.05180 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.05180/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 30 of its 38 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Apr 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 30)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [The Llama 3 Herd of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21783/) (2024)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (2022)
- [BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12597/) (2023)
- [Lost in the Middle: How Language Models Use Long Contexts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.03172/) (2023)
- [Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence: Early experiments with GPT-4](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12712/) (2023)
- [GraphCodeBERT: Pre-training Code Representations with Data Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.08366/) (2020)
- [Can Language Models Solve Graph Problems in Natural Language?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10037/) (2023)
- [VerilogEval: Evaluating Large Language Models for Verilog Code Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.07544/) (2023)
- [GraphGPT: Graph Instruction Tuning for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.13023/) (2023)
- [Chip-Chat: Challenges and Opportunities in Conversational Hardware Design](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13243/) (2023)
- [MolCA: Molecular Graph-Language Modeling with Cross-Modal Projector and Uni-Modal Adapter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.12798/) (2023)
- [ChatEDA: A Large Language Model Powered Autonomous Agent for EDA](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.10204/) (2023)
- [GraphLLM: Boosting Graph Reasoning Ability of Large Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.05845/) (2023)
- [ChipGPT: How far are we from natural language hardware design](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14019/) (2023)
- [BetterV: Controlled Verilog Generation with Discriminative Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03375/) (2024)
- [InstructMol: Multi-Modal Integration for Building a Versatile and Reliable Molecular Assistant in Drug Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16208/) (2023)
- [AutoChip: Automating HDL Generation Using LLM Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.04887/) (2023)
- [MINT-1T: Scaling Open-Source Multimodal Data by 10x: A Multimodal Dataset with One Trillion Tokens](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.11271/) (2024)
- [MG-Verilog: Multi-grained Dataset Towards Enhanced LLM-assisted Verilog Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.01910/) (2024)
- [ADO-LLM: Analog Design Bayesian Optimization with In-Context Learning of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.18770/) (2024)
- [Data is all you need: Finetuning LLMs for Chip Design via an Automated design-data augmentation framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.11202/) (2024)
- [RTLRewriter: Methodologies for Large Models aided RTL Code Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.11414/) (2024)
- [Customized Retrieval Augmented Generation and Benchmarking for EDA Tool Documentation QA](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.15353/) (2024)
- [MEIC: Re-thinking RTL Debug Automation using LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.06840/) (2024)
- [HLSPilot: LLM-based High-Level Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.06810/) (2024)
- [Rethinking Graph Neural Networks for the Graph Coloring Problem](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.06975/) (2022)
- [Natural language is not enough: Benchmarking multi-modal generative AI for Verilog generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.08473/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [LEGO: An LLM Skill-Based Front-End Design Generation Platform](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.23355/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

While many EDA tasks already involve graph-based data, existing LLMs in EDA primarily either represent graphs as sequential text, or simply ignore graph-structured data that might be beneficial like dataflow graphs of RTL code. Recent studies have found that LLM performance suffers when graphs are represented as sequential text, and using additional graph information significantly boosts performance. To address these challenges, we introduce BRIDGES, a framework designed to incorporate graph modality into LLMs for EDA tasks. BRIDGES integrates an automated data generation workflow, a solution that combines graph modality with LLM, and a comprehensive evaluation suite. First, we establish an LLM-driven workflow to generate RTL and netlist-level data, converting them into dataflow and netlist graphs with function descriptions. This workflow yields a large-scale dataset comprising over 500,000 graph instances and more than 1.5 billion tokens. Second, we propose a lightweight cross-modal projector that encodes graph representations into text-compatible prompts, enabling LLMs to effectively utilize graph data without architectural modifications. Experimental results demonstrate 2x to 10x improvements across multiple tasks compared to text-only baselines, including accuracy in design retrieval, type prediction and perplexity in function description, with negligible computational overhead (<1% model weights increase and <30% additional runtime overhead). Even without additional LLM finetuning, our results outperform text-only by a large margin. We plan to release BRIDGES, including the dataset, models, and training flow.