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Main Authors: Kong, Lingcheng, Wei, Jiateng, Shen, Hanzhang, Wang, Huan
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.07356
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author Kong, Lingcheng
Wei, Jiateng
Shen, Hanzhang
Wang, Huan
author_facet Kong, Lingcheng
Wei, Jiateng
Shen, Hanzhang
Wang, Huan
contents GPU kernel generation by LLMs has recently experienced rapid development, leveraging test-time scaling and reinforcement learning techniques. However, a key challenge for kernel generation is the scarcity of high-quality data, as most high-quality kernels are proprietary and not open-source. This challenge prevents us from leveraging supervised fine-tuning to align LLMs to the kernel generation task. To address this challenge, we develop a pipeline that generates and curates high-quality CUDA kernels with reasoning traces, motivated by a critical observation that concise yet informative reasoning traces result in robust generation of high-performance kernels. Using this pipeline, we construct our dataset ConCuR and introduce our model KernelCoder, which is the first model trained on a curated dataset consisting of PyTorch, reasoning, and CUDA kernel pairs, to our knowledge. In the KernelBench setup, our model achieves significant improvements over the existing top-performing model, QwQ-32B, and outperforms all open-source models fine-tuned for kernel generation, as well as frontier models such as DeepSeek-V3.1-Think and Claude-4-sonnet. Finally, we show that the average reasoning length can serve as a metric to assess the difficulty of kernel generation tasks. The observations, metrics, and our data collection and curation pipeline can help obtain better data in the kernel generation task in the future.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_07356
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle ConCuR: Conciseness Makes State-of-the-Art Kernel Generation
Kong, Lingcheng
Wei, Jiateng
Shen, Hanzhang
Wang, Huan
Machine Learning
Computation and Language
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
GPU kernel generation by LLMs has recently experienced rapid development, leveraging test-time scaling and reinforcement learning techniques. However, a key challenge for kernel generation is the scarcity of high-quality data, as most high-quality kernels are proprietary and not open-source. This challenge prevents us from leveraging supervised fine-tuning to align LLMs to the kernel generation task. To address this challenge, we develop a pipeline that generates and curates high-quality CUDA kernels with reasoning traces, motivated by a critical observation that concise yet informative reasoning traces result in robust generation of high-performance kernels. Using this pipeline, we construct our dataset ConCuR and introduce our model KernelCoder, which is the first model trained on a curated dataset consisting of PyTorch, reasoning, and CUDA kernel pairs, to our knowledge. In the KernelBench setup, our model achieves significant improvements over the existing top-performing model, QwQ-32B, and outperforms all open-source models fine-tuned for kernel generation, as well as frontier models such as DeepSeek-V3.1-Think and Claude-4-sonnet. Finally, we show that the average reasoning length can serve as a metric to assess the difficulty of kernel generation tasks. The observations, metrics, and our data collection and curation pipeline can help obtain better data in the kernel generation task in the future.
title ConCuR: Conciseness Makes State-of-the-Art Kernel Generation
topic Machine Learning
Computation and Language
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.07356