Learning When to Optimize: Verified Optimization Skills from Expert GPU-Kernel Lineages

arXiv:2605.28213v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLM-based agents are increasingly used to generate GPU kernels, but they often know what optimizations to try without knowing when those optimizations are sound. We introduce KLineage, which learns this missing "when" knowledge from expert kernels: instead of relying on forward rollouts, KLineage walks expert implementations backward through validation-gated simplifications and reverses each accepted step into a reusable optimization skill. Each sk