Benchmark Almanac

robust-kbench

Not in model cards

Agents write CUDA kernels that are tested across several weight initializations and input shapes, so shape and magnitude exploits fail. Correctness checks and profiling score each kernel.

The maker built it because models could exploit existing kernel benchmarks through input shapes and weight magnitudes.

In the authors’ words

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) demonstrate their effectiveness in scaling test-time compute for software engineering tasks. However, these approaches often focus on high-level solutions, with limited attention to optimizing low-level CUDA kernel implementations. Additionally, existing kernel generation benchmarks suffer from exploitable loopholes and insufficient diversity in testing conditions, hindering true generalization assessment. To address these limitations, we introduce robust-kbench, a new benchmark for rigorous evaluation of kernel performance and correctness across varied scenarios. Furthermore, we present a comprehensive agentic framework that automates CUDA kernel discovery, verification, and optimization. This pipeline enables frontier LLMs to translate torch code to CUDA kernels and iteratively improve their runtime within our robust evaluation setting. Our sequential workflow first translates PyTorch code into equivalent CUDA kernels. It then optimizes their runtime using a novel evolutionary meta-generation procedure tailored to the CUDA ecosystem, guided by LLM-based verifiers for correctness and efficient filtering. Evaluated on robust-kbench, our approach produces CUDA kernels outperforming torch implementations for practical applications, including forward and backward passes. It can fuse operations and deploy various runtime optimization strategies. The verifier workflow accurately classifies incorrect kernels, enhancing hardware verification efficiency.

Abstract of Towards Robust Agentic CUDA Kernel Benchmarking, Verification, and Optimization (arXiv:2509.14279, CC0)
Made by Sakana AI Released Sep 2025 GPU kernels All tasks public
Level
Expert Specialists with years of training, often over hours of work
Scored
Checked automatically A program checks the result against an answer key, unit tests or the expected final state.
Answers
Code A program or patch run against tests.

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We read the headline results of 479 launch posts from 51 labs, and none of them list this benchmark.

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