In May, KDA took top-three placements on every track of the MLSys 2026 FlashInfer kernel contest. That was a good result against the field. It was not a good result against the field's best entries, which were written by people.

KDA 1.5 changes three things and reruns the contest:

1. CuteDSL support, so the agent can express the layouts it wants rather than the ones the previous toolchain made convenient;
2. the IKET profiling skill, which turns a profiler report into something an agent can reason from instead of a wall of counters; and
3. a better agent loop flow — the arrangement of who writes, who checks and what carries between attempts.

The rerun

All numbers are speedups over the FlashInfer baseline, on B300.

Track	KDA 1.0 · 2026-05	Human SOTA · 2026-05	KDA 1.5 · 2026-07	KDA 1.5 over human
MoE FP8 block scale	0.67×	1.80×	2.25×	1.25×
DSA sparse attention	11.91×	22.99×	29.95×	1.30×
GDN prefill	1.16×	4.42×	6.10×	1.39×

The MoE row is the one worth sitting with. KDA 1.0 was slower than the baseline there — 0.67× — and the same application, with a profiling skill and a different loop, is now past the best human entry. Nothing about the model changed.

A workload nobody had tuned

Contest tracks have been optimized by many people, which makes them a fair test and a stale one. So we also pointed KDA 1.5 at Flash-KMeans, which nobody had worked over: balanced k-means for the Wan 2.2 workload on B200 came back 6.1× faster.

KDA · the contest kernels