Embedded Arena: Iterative Optimization via Hardware Feedback

arXiv:2606.16190v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: As AI moves into the physical world, from robots to environmental sensors to medical wearables, it increasingly relies on local inference to meet latency, communication, or privacy constraints. Optimizing models for heterogeneous edge hardware such as microcontrollers (MCUs) requires simultaneously satisfying hard physical constraints on memory, power, and temperature while preserving accuracy, a multidimensional optimization that is today performed manually by experts. We ask whether an LLM agent can autonomously navigate this complex, multi-turn pipeline guided by real hardware feedback, and introduce a hardware-in-the-loop agent arena in which the agent iteratively refines both model and firmware by compiling, flashing, and measuring on real hardware, enabling closed-loop optimization. Frontier models, including Claude Opus 4.7 and Gemini 3.1 Pro, fail entirely without hardware feedback (0% deployment success), whereas our hardware-in-the-loop formulation achieves the first successful deployment within three iterations and can surpass human expert results within seven. This agentic co-optimization achieves 250x compressio