How Can Reinforcement Learning Achieve Expert-level Placement?

arXiv:2604.25191v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Chip placement is a critical step in physical design. While reinforcement learning (RL)-based methods have recently emerged, their training primarily focuses on wirelength optimization, and therefore often fail to achieve expert-quality layouts. We identify the reward design as the primary cause for the performance gap with experts, and instead of formalizing intricate processes, we circumvent this by directly learning from expert layouts to deri