Are LLM-Generated GPU Kernels Production-Ready? A Trace-Driven Benchmark and Optimization Agent

Lingyun Yang, Yuxiao Wang, Shenghao Liang, Linfeng Yang 2026-07-19

Atrex-Bench addresses the problem that existing GPU kernel benchmarks use synthetic or curated workloads, not production traces. The method samples 30 operators and 440 shapes from full-cluster inference traces, weighting each by GPU time and card-hours. Experimental evidence shows the best vanilla model reaches only ~10% of roofline performance, with much apparent correctness from PyTorch fallbacks. This matters because the co-released Atrex-Kernel-Agent (AKA) converts fallbacks into kernels matching hand-tuned baselines, demonstrating a path to production-ready LLM-generated kernels.

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