IC3-Evolve: Proof-/Witness-Gated Offline LLM-Driven Heuristic Evolution for IC3 Hardware Model Checking

ArXi:2604.03232v1 Announce Type: new IC3, also known as property-directed reachability (PDR), is a commonly-used algorithm for hardware safety model checking. It checks if a state transition system complies with a given safety property. IC3 either returns UNSAFE (indicating property violation) with a counterexample trace, or SAFE with a checkable inductive invariant as the proof to safety. In practice, the performance of IC3 is dominated by a large web of interacting heuristics and implementation choices, making manual tuning costly, brittle, and hard to reproduce.