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Embedded Arena: agents deploy models to microcontrollers with hardware feedback

Zhihan Zhang and colleagues, mostly at the University of Washington, published Embedded Arena, a benchmark that scores agents' model and firmware edits on microcontrollers. Boards include a MAX78000, an ESP32-S3 and an STM32N6. The paper reports Claude Opus 4.7 and Gemini 3.1 Pro failing every deployment without hardware feedback; with it, the first success came within 3 iterations.

Open original source arxiv.org · Zhihan Zhang et al.

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Paper reports measured deployment, power and temperature results on real boards; the repo provides the harness and setup docs but no raw run logs in the README.

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Briefing

Each benchmark scores what the board reports: current and energy for power minimization on the MAX78000, temperature for thermal management on the ESP32-S3, and model compression on the MAX78000 and STM32N6. The repo ships seed firmware, host-side drivers, deterministic checks and setup scripts for each toolchain, plus a no-hardware smoke test that runs the agent loop in Docker.

The paper reports about 250 times compression for vision models with under 3.3% accuracy loss. Its case studies include an elk-detection camera trap and a speech wearable for child development research. The hardware runs need the same boards and a measurement setup, and the README shows no raw run logs.

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Repository facts

Repository facts for ubicomplab/embedded-arena, from the GitHub API
Repositoryubicomplab/embedded-arena
Stars13
LanguageC
Last push8 Jul 2026 3 mo ago

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