Kernel-Smith: A Unified Recipe for Evolutionary Kernel Optimization
Shanghai AI Laboratory
arXiv:2603.28342 [cs.CL], (30 Mar 2026)
@misc{du2026kernelsmith,
title={Kernel-Smith: A Unified Recipe for Evolutionary Kernel Optimization},
author={He Du and Qiming Ge and Jiakai Hu and Aijun Yang and Zheng Cai and Zixian Huang and Sheng Yuan and Qinxiu Cheng and Xinchen Xie and Yicheng Chen and Yining Li and Jiaxing Xie and Huanan Dong and Yaguang Wu and Xiangjun Huang and Jian Yang and Hui Wang and Bowen Zhou and Bowen Li and Qipeng Guo and Kai Chen},
year={2026},
eprint={2603.28342},
archivePrefix={arXiv},
primaryClass={cs.CL},
url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.28342}
}
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.
April 13, 2026 by hgpu
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