Beyond atol and rtol: Sound Test Oracles for Low-Precision GPU Kernels

Abstract

Low-precision GPU kernels are commonly tested against a reference using hand-picked absolute and relative tolerances. Legitimate numerical error varies with the input, format and precision plan, so a fixed tolerance trades false alarms for missed faults. We present numoracle, which derives per-element acceptance regions from precision-annotated reference programs. Its calculus tracks shared rounding errors, provenance-ordered products, block-scaled quantizers and calibrated math-library errors. A rounding-interval check detects faulty stores that symmetric bounds can admit. Soundness is conditional on explicit rounding, hardware, domain and implementation assumptions; a fixed-input mode removes the zero-mean rounding assumption. We evaluate 13 Triton operators from Liger-Kernel, Unsloth and vLLM on two GPU generations. The main campaigns produce no false alarm on 33,960 correct-kernel and behavior-preserving-variant runs per GPU. Under input shift, the GPU campaigns record no false alarm while tuned tolerances flag up to 30% of correct runs; final-version reference checks identify inputs without complete finite-range certificates. On the RTX PRO 6000, numoracle kills 116 of 124 effective mutants, versus 59-83 for four fixed baselines. Among 400 tuned tolerance configurations, requiring at most 1% false alarms in every evaluated Liger input group permits at most 31 of 53 main-mutant kills, versus numoracle's 50. Historical replays expose accuracy faults in eight change pairs without rejecting their matched corrected controls; a ninth change concerns rounding parity.