AI agents are now capable of writing, compiling, and iteratively optimizing low-level operator kernels on different hardware platforms. Existing benchmarks, however, focus almost exclusively on CUDA and Triton, leaving hardware ecosystems with less-exposed programming models without a common evaluation baseline. We present CANN Bench, an open benchmark for AI-generated operator code on Huawei's Ascend NPU. The current release covers 53 operators and 1060 test cases organized into four difficulty tiers -- from simple elementwise primitives to MoE dispatch and FlashAttention kernels -- spanning FP16, BF16, FP32, and INT8 precision formats. Evaluation adopts a \textbf{three-dimensional weighted composite score} that treats compilation, functional correctness, and performance as independent axes, providing a principled reward signal for kernel-generation agents. Performance is graded against an out-of-the-box PyTorch-on-Ascend baseline and an analytical per-case Hardware-Anchored Performance (HAP) limit on real NPU hardware, ensuring scores reflect genuine optimization headroom rather than measurement artifacts. The evaluation harness is designed to resist reward hacking from the ground up. CANN Bench is versioned within the official CANN repository and is designed for long-term community co-construction, providing the Ascend ecosystem with a quantitative, reproducible, and sustainably maintained yardstick for AI operator-authoring capability.
Xue-Jian Gao, Deng Pan, Yueming Su et al.· 1 citation
AI coding agents need more than relevant snippets: they need business semantics, validation evidence, relations, and assurance that their context is current. Existing systems usually infer or externalize this knowledge through retrieval, summaries, graphs, rules, or reverse specifications. We investigate a complementary representation in which selected code units directly carry agent-usable knowledge. We introduce Executable Code Knowledge (ECK) and define an Executable Code Knowledge Unit (ECKU) as a source-bound object combining stable identity, semantics, executable behavior, contracts, evidence, relations, provenance, validation state, and a query interface. Our Python prototype supports code-local authoring, manifest export, evidence execution, exact changed-line impact, freshness checking, and agent-facing projections. Across three real Python repositories and 26 controlled patch tasks, direct ECK provides executable test coverage for 11/11 evidence-bearing tasks and exact selectors for 9/11; hiding declared evidence reduces exact recovery to 1/11 (paired exact McNemar p=0.0078). ECK-derived rules recover 11/11 exact selectors, showing that rules are effective delivery artifacts while ECK supplies source binding, validation state, impact, and freshness. Exact changed-line impact matches independently authored labels on all 26 patches (12 unit links; precision, recall, and F1 all 1.000). AST-bounded fingerprints classify 50 positive changes and 17 unrelated same-file controls correctly, whereas static rules snapshots detect none of the 50 stale cases. Model-backed patch-review and cross-layer studies measure projection fidelity rather than independent impact discovery. These results support a hybrid architecture: retrieval for coverage, ECK for source and evidence governance, and projections for delivery.
Agent Skills package reusable instructions and assets for tool-using language-model agents. Progressive loading creates failure boundaries poorly represented by session-, model-, or tool-centric traces: a Skill can be discovered but not activated, activated without instructions, or appear successful without an independently verified outcome. We present Skill Runtime Intelligence, a passive runtime-intelligence system that reconstructs supported Skill-lifecycle stages across heterogeneous harnesses while preserving unsupported stages as unknown. Its Run Panorama separates immutable events, deterministic relations, inferred diagnoses, and controlled outcomes with four evidence grades; optional trace import and OTLP/HTTP export support existing observability deployments. Across six frozen repository profiles, three coding agents, and seven clean or fault-injected conditions, all 126 executions preserve source worktrees and each correlates to exactly one source session. Yet adapters expose three distinct semantics: no Skill runs; complete runs but no failure-like events; or failure-like events in every operational-failure and clean session. In a seven-template diagnostic study, semantic aliases and Panorama localize the same six non-clean boundaries but differ in exact/status behavior; both Raw views emit a failure status on all 18 clean cases, while Panorama emits none. A known-rule graph conforms to 126/126 frozen contracts, whereas a second model completes only 228/378 calls. These observations motivate executable adapter qualification and show that event presence is not boundary fidelity, composite exact scores mask distinct errors, and model explanations must not overwrite deterministic facts.