Train on Pins and Test on Obstacles for Rectilinear Steiner Minimum Tree
Xingbo Du, Ruizhe Zhong, Junchi Yan
The Rectilinear Steiner Minimum Tree (RSMT) is widely used in Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) and aims at connecting a set of pins using rectilinear edges while minimizing wirelength. Recently, learning-based methods have been explored to tackle this problem effectively. However, existing methods either suffer from excessive exploration of the search space or rely on heuristic combinations that compromise effectiveness and efficiency, and this limitation becomes notably exacerbated when extended to the obstacle-avoiding RSMT (OARSMT). To address this, we propose OAREST, a reinforcement learning-based framework for constructing an Obstacle-Avoiding Rectilinear Edge Sequence (RES) Tree. We theoretically establish the optimality of RES in obstacle-avoiding scenarios, which forms the foundation of our approach. Leveraging this theoretical insight, we introduce a dynamic masking strategy that supports parallel training across varying numbers of pins and extends to obstacles during inference. Empirical evaluations on both synthetic and real-world benchmarks show superior effectiveness and efficiency for RSMT and OARSMT problems, particularly in handling obstacles without training on them. Code available: \url{https://anonymous.4open.science/r/OAREST-D386/}.