Kernel Contracts: A Specification Language for ML Kernel Correctness Across Heterogeneous Silicon
Every ML kernel ships with an implicit contract about what it computes. People rarely write the contract down. When two kernels disagree -- when a matmul on AMD produces a different gradient than the same matmul on NVIDIA, when a fused attention kernel silently downcasts an accumulator, when an out-of-bounds access returns zero on one stack and garbage on another -- there is no formal artifact to arbitrate the dispute. Recent empirical work has measured the gap across silicon platforms, but none of it specifies the contract being violated. We present a specification language for kernel contracts. A contract has eight parts: identifier, scope, precondition, postcondition, tolerance, refere...
| Authors | Cooper Veit |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 23 April 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 23 April 2026 |
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