AgentKernelArena: Generalization-Aware Benchmarking of GPU Kernel Optimization Agents

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Younesian, Sharareh, Ouyang, Wenwen, Rafati, Sina, Rezagholizadeh, Mehdi, Zhou, Sharon, Liu, Ji, Liu, Yue, Yang, Yuchen, Li, Hao, Liu, Ziqiong, Li, Dong, Appia, Vikram, Gu, Zhenyu, Barsoum, Emad
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2026
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author Younesian, Sharareh
Ouyang, Wenwen
Rafati, Sina
Rezagholizadeh, Mehdi
Zhou, Sharon
Liu, Ji
Liu, Yue
Yang, Yuchen
Li, Hao
Liu, Ziqiong
Li, Dong
Appia, Vikram
Gu, Zhenyu
Barsoum, Emad
author_facet Younesian, Sharareh
Ouyang, Wenwen
Rafati, Sina
Rezagholizadeh, Mehdi
Zhou, Sharon
Liu, Ji
Liu, Yue
Yang, Yuchen
Li, Hao
Liu, Ziqiong
Li, Dong
Appia, Vikram
Gu, Zhenyu
Barsoum, Emad
contents GPU kernel optimization is increasingly critical for efficient deep learning systems, but writing high-performance kernels still requires substantial low-level expertise. Recent AI coding agents can iteratively read code, invoke compilers and profilers, and refine implementations, yet existing kernel benchmarks evaluate single LLM calls rather than full agent workflows, and none include both kernel-to-kernel optimization and unseen-configuration generalization testing. We present AgentKernelArena, an open-source benchmark for measuring AI coding agents on GPU kernel optimization. The benchmark contains 196 tasks spanning HIP-to-HIP optimization, Triton-to-Triton optimization, and PyTorch-to-HIP translation, and evaluates complete agent workflows in isolated workspaces using gated compilation, correctness, and performance checks, centralized scoring and an unseen-configuration generalization protocol that tests whether optimizations transfer to input configurations the agent never observed. Across production agents including Cursor Agent, Claude Code, and Codex Agent, we find near-perfect compilation and high correctness rates on most task categories, with the strongest configurations achieving mean speedups of up to 6.89x on PyTorch-to-HIP, 6.69x on HIP-to-HIP, and 2.13x on Triton-to-Triton tasks. Our unseen-configuration evaluation shows that HIP-to-HIP and Triton-to-Triton optimizations largely transfer to unseen input shapes, while PyTorch-to-HIP exhibits substantial correctness drops, indicating that agents generating kernels from scratch frequently hardcode shape-specific assumptions. AgentKernelArena is designed as a modular, extensible framework for rigorous evaluation of agentic GPU kernel optimization across agents, tasks, and hardware targets.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_16819
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle AgentKernelArena: Generalization-Aware Benchmarking of GPU Kernel Optimization Agents
Younesian, Sharareh
Ouyang, Wenwen
Rafati, Sina
Rezagholizadeh, Mehdi
Zhou, Sharon
Liu, Ji
Liu, Yue
Yang, Yuchen
Li, Hao
Liu, Ziqiong
Li, Dong
Appia, Vikram
Gu, Zhenyu
Barsoum, Emad
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
GPU kernel optimization is increasingly critical for efficient deep learning systems, but writing high-performance kernels still requires substantial low-level expertise. Recent AI coding agents can iteratively read code, invoke compilers and profilers, and refine implementations, yet existing kernel benchmarks evaluate single LLM calls rather than full agent workflows, and none include both kernel-to-kernel optimization and unseen-configuration generalization testing. We present AgentKernelArena, an open-source benchmark for measuring AI coding agents on GPU kernel optimization. The benchmark contains 196 tasks spanning HIP-to-HIP optimization, Triton-to-Triton optimization, and PyTorch-to-HIP translation, and evaluates complete agent workflows in isolated workspaces using gated compilation, correctness, and performance checks, centralized scoring and an unseen-configuration generalization protocol that tests whether optimizations transfer to input configurations the agent never observed. Across production agents including Cursor Agent, Claude Code, and Codex Agent, we find near-perfect compilation and high correctness rates on most task categories, with the strongest configurations achieving mean speedups of up to 6.89x on PyTorch-to-HIP, 6.69x on HIP-to-HIP, and 2.13x on Triton-to-Triton tasks. Our unseen-configuration evaluation shows that HIP-to-HIP and Triton-to-Triton optimizations largely transfer to unseen input shapes, while PyTorch-to-HIP exhibits substantial correctness drops, indicating that agents generating kernels from scratch frequently hardcode shape-specific assumptions. AgentKernelArena is designed as a modular, extensible framework for rigorous evaluation of agentic GPU kernel optimization across agents, tasks, and hardware targets.
title AgentKernelArena: Generalization-Aware Benchmarking of GPU Kernel Optimization Agents
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.16819