Groups | Search | Server Info | Login | Register

Groups > comp.compilers > #3713

Re: Paper: Magellan: Autonomous Discovery of Novel Compiler Optimization Heuristics with AlphaEvolve

Show all headers | View raw

John,

A paper with "novel" in the title is a major red flag.

> This Google paper describes an AI approach to invent new compiler
> optimizations.

No they don't.  They use an LLM to select the tuning parameters
for a well established optimization, function inlining.

> surpass expert baselines. In LLVM function inlining, Magellan synthesizes
> new heuristics that outperform decades of manual engineering for both
> binary-size reduction and end-to-end performance.

"... the continued Gemini-3-Pro run achieves consistent
positive speedups beyond 0%, ultimately surpassing the hand-
tuned baseline by 0.61%."

Figure 3/4 suggests a much bigger improvement, until the reader
realises that the comparison is not against human generated
rules.  Results given to two decimal places and no error bars!

>                                                 In register allocation,
> it learns a concise priority rule for live-range processing that matches
> intricate human-designed policies on a large-scale workload.

This sentence in the abstract goes undiscussed in the paper, which
only looks at inlining.

Back to comp.compilers | Previous | Next — Previous in thread | Find similar

Thread

Paper: Magellan: Autonomous Discovery of Novel Compiler Optimization Heuristics with AlphaEvolve John R Levine <johnl@taugh.com> - 2026-01-30 10:53 -0500
  Re: Paper: Magellan: Autonomous Discovery of Novel Compiler Optimization Heuristics with AlphaEvolve Derek <derek@shape-of-code.com> - 2026-02-01 17:37 +0000

csiph-web