Kernel-Smith: A Unified Recipe for Evolutionary Kernel Optimization
We present Kernel-Smith, a framework for high-performance GPU kernel and operator generation that combines a stable evaluation-driven evolutionary agent with an evolution-oriented post-training recipe. On the agent side, Kernel-Smith maintains a population of executable candidates and iteratively improves them using an archive of top-performing and diverse programs together with structured execution feedback on compilation, correctness, and speedup. To make this search reliable, we build backend-specific evaluation services for Triton on NVIDIA GPUs and Maca on MetaX GPUs. On the training side, we convert long-horizon evolution trajectories into step-centric supervision and reinforcement learning signals by retaining correctness-preserving, high-gain revisions, so that the model is optimized as a strong local improver inside the evolutionary loop rather than as a one-shot generator. Under a unified evolutionary protocol, Kernel-Smith-235B-RL achieves state-of-the-art overall performance on KernelBench with Nvidia Triton backend, attaining the best average speedup ratio and outperforming frontier proprietary models including Gemini-3.0-pro and Claude-4.6-opus. We further validate the framework on the MetaX MACA backend, where our Kernel-Smith-MACA-30B surpasses large-scale counterparts such as DeepSeek-V3.2-think and Qwen3-235B-2507-think, highlighting potential for seamless adaptation across heterogeneous platforms. Beyond benchmark results, the same workflow produces upstream contributions to production systems including SGLang and LMDeploy, demonstrating that LLM-driven kernel optimization can transfer from controlled evaluation to practical deployment.
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He Du
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2026-03-31T09:28:28.216Z
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Qiming Ge
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Jiakai Hu
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Aijun Yang
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2026-04-01T08:36:13.693Z
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yang
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Zheng Cai
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Zheng Cai
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Zixian Huang
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2026-03-31T09:45:08.024Z
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Zixian Huang
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Sheng Yuan
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Qinxiu Cheng
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Xinchen Xie
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Yicheng Chen
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Yining Li
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2026-04-16T20:22:32.967Z
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Yining Li
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Jiaxing Xie
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Huanan Dong
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Yaguang Wu
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Xiangjun Huang
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Jian Yang
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Hui Wang
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Bowen Zhou
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Bowen Li
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Qipeng Guo
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2026-03-31T09:44:51.253Z
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Qipeng Guo
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Kai Chen
Kernel-Smith: A Unified Recipe for Evolutionary Kernel Optimization
We present Kernel-Smith, a framework for high-performance GPU kernel and operator generation that combines a stable evaluation-driven evolutionary agent with an evolution-oriented post-training recipe. On the agent side, Kernel-Smith maintains a population of executable candidates and iteratively improves them using an archive of top-performing and diverse programs together with structured execution feedback on compilation, correctness, and speedup. To make this search reliable, we build backend-specific evaluation services for Triton on NVIDIA GPUs and Maca on MetaX GPUs. On the training side, we convert long-horizon evolution trajectories into step-centric supervision and reinforcement learning signals by retaining correctness-preserving, high-gain revisions, so that the model is optimized as a strong local improver inside the evolutionary loop rather than as a one-shot generator. Under a unified evolutionary protocol, Kernel-Smith-235B-RL achieves state-of-the-art overall performance on KernelBench with Nvidia Triton backend, attaining the best average speedup ratio and outperforming frontier proprietary models including Gemini-3.0-pro and Claude-4.6-opus. We further validate the framework on the MetaX MACA backend, where our Kernel-Smith-MACA-30B surpasses large-scale counterparts such as DeepSeek-V3.2-think and Qwen3-235B-2507-think, highlighting potential for seamless adaptation across heterogeneous platforms. Beyond benchmark results, the same workflow produces upstream contributions to production systems including SGLang and LMDeploy, demonstrating that LLM-driven kernel optimization can transfer from controlled evaluation to practical deployment.
Kernel-Smith is a GPU kernel generation framework that combines evolutionary algorithms with post-training reinforcement learning to optimize performance across different hardware backends.
evolutionary agent evolutionary loop reinforcement learning Triton Maca KernelBench LLM-driven optimization production systems SGLang LMDeploy