KernelArc: A Multi-Agent Framework for GPU Kernel Optimization
TL;DR
KernelArc, a multi-agent framework for autonomous GPU kernel optimization across heterogeneous workloads, can broaden exploration and reach stronger incumbents within a fixed candidate budget, while the value of individual coordination features depends on the kernel and optimization stage.
Abstract
We present KernelArc, a multi-agent framework for autonomous GPU kernel optimization across heterogeneous workloads. Strategy-specialized agents run in parallel and coordinate through conclusions-only shared memory, a deterministic benchmark guard, and read-only cross-agent state with plateau-triggered drafting. We evaluate KernelArc on NVIDIA H100 and B200 GPUs using category-representative SOL-ExecBench workloads. The resulting implementations span custom BF16 GEMM, static cuBLASLt Expert-API configuration tables, fused mixture-of-experts backward, shape-gated decoder-layer fusion, native NVFP4 grouped-query attention, and paged prefill attention. In the public SOL-ExecBench leaderboard snapshot recorded on August~20, 2026, KernelArc ranked first on every representative L1, L2, Quantization, and FlashInfer task evaluated. The trajectories support the paper's central motivation: shared multi-agent search can broaden exploration and reach stronger incumbents within a fixed candidate budget, while the value of individual coordination features depends on the kernel and optimization stage.