AVO: NVIDIA Agentic Variation Operators Beat FlashAttention-4 by 10.5% via 7-Day Autonomous Evolutionary Search on B200 GPUs

arXiv·high signal

NVIDIA researchers replace fixed evolutionary mutation/crossover with autonomous coding agents that consult lineage, knowledge bases, and execution feedback. Over 7 days of continuous autonomous evolution on Blackwell B200 GPUs, AVO discovers multi-head attention kernels that outperform cuDNN by 3.5% and FlashAttention-4 by 10.5%. Optimizations transfer to grouped-query attention with just 30 minutes of adaptation, achieving 9.3% over FlashAttention-4. This is the first demonstration of agentic coding surpassing expert-engineered GPU kernels.