Multi-turn RL with Structural and Performance Aware Rewards for CUDA Kernel Generation

The exponential growth in demand for GPU computing resources has created an urgent need for automated CUDA optimization strategies. While recent advances in LLMs show promise for code generation, current SOTA models achieve low success rates in improving CUDA speed. In this paper, we introduce CUDA-L1, an automated reinforcement learning framework for CUDA optimization that employs a novel contrastive RL algorithm. CUDA-L1 achieves significant performance improvements on the CUDA optimization task: trained on A100, it delivers an average speedup of x3.12 with a median speedup of x1.42 against default baselines over across all 250 CUDA kernels of KernelBench, with peak speedups reaching x120. In addition to the default baseline provided by KernelBench, CUDA-L1 demonstrates x2.77 over Torch Compile, x2.88 over Torch Compile with reduce overhead, x2.81 over CUDA Graph implementations, and x7.72 over cuDNN libraries. Furthermore, the model also demonstrates portability across different GPU architectures. Beyond these benchmark results, CUDA-L1 demonstrates several properties: it 1) discovers a variety of CUDA optimization techniques and learns to combine them strategically to achieve optimal performance; 2) uncovers fundamental principles of CUDA optimization, such as the multiplicative nature of optimizations; 3) identifies non-obvious performance bottlenecks and rejects seemingly beneficial optimizations that actually harm performance. The capabilities demonstrate that, RL can transform an initially poor-performing LLM into an effective CUDA optimizer through speedup-based reward signals alone, without human expertise or domain knowledge. This paradigm opens possibilities for automated optimization of CUDA operations, and holds promise to substantially promote GPU efficiency and alleviate the rising pressure on GPU computing resources. Project: deepreinforce-ai.github.io/cudal1_blog

Post-training large language models (LLMs) via reinforcement learning (RL) has significantly advanced code generation capabilities. To bypass the heavy memory footprint of critic networks, current state-of-the-art frameworks leverage critic-free paradigms like Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) tied to rule-based verification sandboxes. However, applying these frameworks to low-level systems programming, such as CUDA kernel generation-presents severe challenges: binary pass/fail rewards introduce severe signal sparsity, while multi-turn environmental feedback loops suffer from prohibitive compilation latencies and reward dilution across trajectories. In this work, we introduce LEAP (Lean Environment-Feedback via Adaptive Pruning), a scalable and computationally efficient multi-turn RL framework optimized for low-level hardware accelerator alignment. LEAP features Difficulty-Conditioned Pruning (DCP), a dynamic gating mechanism that adaptively cuts off simple and overly catastrophic tasks from multi-turn expansion, focusing resource-heavy compilation and hardware exploration exclusively on high-value, complex tasks. To fully operationalize these paths without manual hyperparameter engineering, we propose a Rank-Based Reward formulation. By deriving scale-free relative advantages from pairwise tournament outcomes within the GRPO rollout group, our method inherently penalizes token inefficiency on simple prompts while maximizing learning gradients on challenging distributions. Empirical evaluations show that LEAP achieves superior first-turn proficiency and robust multi-turn debugging resilience while converging faster than unpruned multi-turn baselines, establishing a practical paradigm for low-level code RL.

We present KernelPro, a closed-loop multi-agent system that automatically generates, profiles, and iteratively optimizes GPU kernel code by integrating large language model (LLM) code generation with hardware profiler feedback and pluggable bottleneck detection tools. KernelPro introduces four contributions: (1) a semantic feedback operator that encodes expert heuristics as pluggable micro-profiling tools, transforming raw hardware metrics into actionable natural language guidance; (2) a two-stage tool invocation architecture where roofline-based bottleneck classification filters which specialized analysis tools execute, combining kernel-level (ncu), instruction-level (SASS), and system-level (nsys) profiling; (3) a domain-adapted MCTS with progressive widening, asymmetric branching, log-reward calibration, dead-end pruning, and search memory for cross-iteration learning; and (4) direct CuTe source-level code generation via autonomous code search over the CUTLASS/CuTe codebase. On KernelBench, KernelPro achieves geometric mean speedups of 2.42x/4.69x/5.30x on Levels 1/2/3, establishing state-of-the-art performance across all difficulty levels. On VeOmni's expert-optimized MoE training kernels, KernelPro achieves 1.23x over hand-tuned Triton by generating a from-scratch raw-CUDA+CuTe Hopper WGMMA kernel. Ablation studies demonstrate that each design component independently and significantly improves optimization quality: micro-profiling tools (p < 0.0001 vs raw metrics), MCTS search (26% higher geometric mean vs greedy, p = 0.004), and proactive tool orchestration (23% improvement, p = 0.035). Finally, KernelPro is the first CUDA kernel coding agent to optimize energy efficiency beyond the speed-only focus of prior systems, demonstrating an 11.6% measured energy reduction at matched speed.