Beyond Experience: Knowledge-Guided Evolution for NPU Kernel Generation

Overview & Synopsis

LLM agents have become capable kernel engineers on mainstream GPU stacks, but they struggle on emerging accelerators such as Ascend NPUs, whose programming model is barely represented in pretraining data. Recent NPU agents address this gap largely through experience: they accumulate memory from their own generation and optimization trials and reuse it on later tasks. We argue that experience alone is not enough for kernel generation. An agent can only remember what it has tried, and it rarely tries a mechanism it does not know. As a result, such memory offers little help when a new operator calls for a different mechanism, and even familiar operators raise unseen situations as optimization proceeds. We present ASCENDEVOLVE, which grounds every step of an evolutionary kernel search in a large external knowledge base built from platform documentation, toolkit headers, and operator repositories. Because this corpus far exceeds any context window, ASCENDEVOLVE indexes it and routes each agent to a small, task-specific slice of evidence instead of the corpus itself. The retrieved knowledge seeds diverse implementation strategies, guides repair when a candidate fails, and constrains how strong candidates are recombined. On 53 Ascend C operators from CANN-Bench spanning four difficulty levels, ASCENDEVOLVE achieves an overall score of 71.39, improving over Reflexion and OpenEvolve by 11.6% and 17.2%.