# wa-hls4ml: A Benchmark and Surrogate Models for hls4ml Resource and Latency Estimation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.05615 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.05615/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 16 of its 35 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 Nov 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [Graph Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10903/) (2017)
- [Layer Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.06450/) (2016)
- [Fast Graph Representation Learning with PyTorch Geometric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.02428/) (2019)
- [Fast inference of deep neural networks in FPGAs for particle physics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.06913/) (2018)
- [Automatic heterogeneous quantization of deep neural networks for low-latency inference on the edge for particle detectors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.10159/) (2020)
- [hls4ml: An Open-Source Codesign Workflow to Empower Scientific Low-Power Machine Learning Devices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.05579/) (2021)
- [High-Level Synthesis Performance Prediction using GNNs: Benchmarking, Modeling, and Advancing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.06848/) (2022)
- [FastML Science Benchmarks: Accelerating Real-Time Scientific Edge Machine Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.07958/) (2022)
- [Open-source FPGA-ML codesign for the MLPerf Tiny Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.11791/) (2022)
- [DB4HLS: A Database of High-Level Synthesis Design Space Explorations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00587/) (2021)
- [HLSFactory: A Framework Empowering High-Level Synthesis Datasets for Machine Learning and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.00820/) (2024)
- [Liveness-Driven Random Program Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.04421/) (2017)
- [rule4ml: An Open-Source Tool for Resource Utilization and Latency Estimation for ML Models on FPGA](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.05314/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [DiffHLS: Differential Learning for High-Level Synthesis QoR Prediction with GNNs and LLM Code Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.09240/) (2026)
- [SNAC-Pack 2.0: Scaled-Out Surrogate Neural Architecture Codesign](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.16138/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

As machine learning (ML) is increasingly implemented in hardware to address real-time challenges in scientific applications, the development of advanced toolchains has significantly reduced the time required to iterate on various designs. These advancements have solved major obstacles, but also exposed new challenges. For example, processes that were not previously considered bottlenecks, such as hardware synthesis, are becoming limiting factors in the rapid iteration of designs. To mitigate these emerging constraints, multiple efforts have been undertaken to develop an ML-based surrogate model that estimates resource usage of ML accelerator architectures. We introduce wa-hls4ml, a benchmark for ML accelerator resource and latency estimation, and its corresponding initial dataset of over 680,000 fully connected and convolutional neural networks, all synthesized using hls4ml and targeting Xilinx FPGAs. The benchmark evaluates the performance of resource and latency predictors against several common ML model architectures, primarily originating from scientific domains, as exemplar models, and the average performance across a subset of the dataset. Additionally, we introduce GNN- and transformer-based surrogate models that predict latency and resources for ML accelerators. We present the architecture and performance of the models and find that the models generally predict latency and resources for the 75% percentile within several percent of the synthesized resources on the synthetic test dataset.