JustGoal: With Only a Goal, the AI Baseline Is Above the Expert Kernels

Yaojian Chen; Dazhi Peng; Zhui Zhu; Leshan Li; Haojun Sun; Yiyun Zheng; Qingfeng He; Shangzhan Li; Xianglong Deng; Yifei Shen; Shengye Xiang; Zhen Li; Lin Gan; Yuxuan Li; Xu Han; Zhiyuan Liu

arXiv · 2610.36434

JustGoal: With Only a Goal, the AI Baseline Is Above the Expert Kernels

Yaojian Chen·Dazhi Peng·Zhui Zhu·Leshan Li·Haojun Sun·Yiyun Zheng·Qingfeng He·Shangzhan Li·Xianglong Deng·Yifei Shen·Shengye Xiang·Zhen Li·Lin Gan·Yuxuan Li·Xu Han·Zhiyuan Liu

View original source ↗Read source document ↗Export metadata ↓

Abstract

A small number of GPU kernels often determines the efficiency of large language model training and inference. High-performance kernel development typically relies on expert knowledge through manual implementation, collaboration with general-purpose models, or specialized agents equipped with domain knowledge, evaluation methods, and search workflows. We investigate how much value this knowledge provides as foundation models become stronger. We introduce JustGoal, a goal-only baseline in which a general-purpose agent receives only the optimization objective and constraints, without kernel-specific infrastructure, knowledge bases, or predefined workflows, and builds its own evaluation loop. On NVIDIA B200 GPUs, JustGoal outperforms open-source libraries on 8 of 10 operators, achieving per-operator geometric mean speedups of 1.14x to 2.34x. It also surpasses the fastest publicly released specialized-agent kernel on 5 of 9 operators with available comparisons. In a controlled same-model comparison using Fable 5.1 on single shapes, the KDA-0.5 harness reaches 0.95x of JustGoal's performance, while single-mechanism ablations show no consistent benefit from domain knowledge or predefined workflows. These results indicate that specialized machinery should be justified by clear gains over a same-model, same-scope goal-only baseline and reevaluated whenever the foundation model changes.

Explore related subjects

cs.DC

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeX RIS

Yaojian Chen, Dazhi Peng, Zhui Zhu, Leshan Li, Haojun Sun, Yiyun Zheng, Qingfeng He, Shangzhan Li, Xianglong Deng, Yifei Shen, Shengye Xiang, Zhen Li, Lin Gan, Yuxuan Li, Xu Han, Zhiyuan Liu. 2026-10-27. JustGoal: With Only a Goal, the AI Baseline Is Above the Expert Kernels. https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.36434

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

arXiv2026

R2CC: Reliable and Resilient Collective Communication for Distributed Learning

Modern ML training and inference now span hundreds to tens of thousands of GPUs, where failures can waste 10-15% of GPU hours due to slow recovery. Common network errors and link fluctuations can cause up to 50% of job interruptions, triggering timeouts that often terminate entire jobs, forcing expensive checkpoint rollback during training and request reprocessing during inference. We present R2CC, a fault-tolerant communication library that provides lossless, low-overhead failover by exploiting multi-NIC hardware. R2CC performs rapid connection migration, bandwidth-aware load redistribution, and resilient collective algorithms to maintain progress under failures. We evaluate R2CC on four 8-GPU H100 InfiniBand servers and via large-scale ML simulators modeling up to 1024 GPUs with diverse failure patterns. Experiments show that R2CC is highly robust to inter-node network failures, incurring less than 1.1% training and 3% inference overhead under active failure scenarios. Compared to existing fault-tolerant approaches, R2CC reduces failure-induced overhead by up to 92% for training and 98% for inference. R2CC is open-sourced at https://github.com/r2cc-project/R2CC.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2026

ML-ECS: Heterogeneity-Aware Collaborative Multimodal Learning for Edge-Cloud Synergies

Edge-cloud synergies provide a promising paradigm for privacy-preserving deployment of foundation models in heterogeneous web environments, enabling lightweight edge models to support domain-specific multimodal we b services while cloud-hosted models facilitate collaborative knowledge sharing. However, in practical edge-cloud web environments, collaborative multimodal learning is challenged by modality heterogeneity (different modality combinations across domains) and model-structure heterogeneity (different modality-specific encoders/fusion modules). To address these issues, we propose ML-ECS, a collaborative multimodal learning framework that enables joint training between a server-based model and heterogeneous edge models. This framework consists of four components: (1) cross-modal contrastive learning (CCL) to align modality representations in a shared latent space, (2) adaptive multimodal tuning (AMT) to preserve domain-specific knowledge from local datasets, (3) modality-aware aggregation (MAA) to robustly aggregate while mitigating noise caused by missing modalities, and (4) SLM-enhanced CCL (SE-CCL) to facilitate bidirectional knowledge transfer between cloud and edge. Experimental results on various multimodal tasks show that ML-ECS consistently outperform state-of-the-art baselines under varying modality availability, achieving improvements of 1.55% to 16.75% in Rouge-LSum and improving both client- and server-side performance. In addition, by communicating only low-rank LoRA parameters and fused representations, ML-ECS achieves high communication efficiency, requiring only 0.71% of the total parameter volume.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2026

Agar: What-If Analysis for Microservice Applications

Microservice operators must reason about how applications would behave under changes that have not yet occurred: different workloads, resource allocations, or SLO targets. Evaluating every alternative experimentally is expensive, but predicting such counterfactuals is difficult because microservices contain many interacting components. End-to-end models must learn behavior over a combinatorial space of conditions, but composing per-component predictors causes prediction errors to accumulate. We address this challenge by changing what each component model must predict. Rather than predicting exact values, we learn simple, interpretable bounds that contain every observed behavior while remaining tight enough to support useful end-to-end conclusions. We build AGAR, a counterfactual performance analysis tool that composes these models to answer end-to-end SLO-feasibility questions. This allows us to formulate autoscaling as a counterfactual query: what is the smallest resource allocation under which an SLO is met? Our evaluation demonstrates that across three microservice applications, AGAR's bounds are actionable: its derived autoscaler reduces CPU allocation by up to 36.8% over state-of-the-art horizontal autoscalers while satisfying application SLOs. Further, AGAR is able to predict operational cost given workload traces, provide guidance on which service's startup time to optimize and localize performance bugs within each application.

cs.DC↗