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Operator-Aware Mixed-Precision Tolerance Calibration for Tensor Kernels

Machine Learning 2026-06-23 v1 Mathematical Software

Abstract

Most tensor-kernel correctness tests go through a fixed-shape all close-style check with hand-picked absolute and relative tolerances. The thresholds are copied across the corpus and rarely revisited. We mine the element-wise error distribution of every test case from accumulated cloud GPU runs across the 26-entry gpuemu corpus and 2 dtypes (8,076 result rows). We then ask one empirical question: what absolute tolerance would the kernel itself, observed under its correct implementation, justify? The answer is much tighter than the current hand-picked atol. The largest tightening is attention_triton fp16 at 2,184×2{,}184\times. Restricted to the seven LLM-style buggy variants for which the corpus ships a paired correct counterpart, calibrated per-(op, dtype) tolerances raise bug-detection recall from 73.2% (1,805 of 2,467) to 82.4% (2,034 of 2,467), an absolute gain of 9.3 percentage points (+229 new detections). The control false-positive count rises from 0 to 20 out of 1,882 correct-control cases (+1.1 percentage points).

Cite

@article{arxiv.2607.16228,
  title  = {Operator-Aware Mixed-Precision Tolerance Calibration for Tensor Kernels},
  author = {Dipankar Sarkar},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2607.16228},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

8 pages, 1 figure, LNCS format. Companion paper: arXiv:2606.20128 (P1). Additional companions (P3, P4) to follow on arXiv this week; IDs will be added in a v2 replace