Orchestra-Research/AI-Research-SKILLs.

academic-plotting

Generates publication-quality figures for ML papers from research context. Given a paper section or description, extracts system components and relationships to generate architecture diagrams via Gemini. Given experiment results or data, auto-selects chart type and generates data-driven figures via matplotlib/seaborn. Use when creating any figure for a conference paper.

ara-compiler

Compiles any research input — PDF papers, GitHub repositories, experiment logs, code directories, or raw notes — into a complete Agent-Native Research Artifact (ARA) with cognitive layer (claims, concepts, heuristics), physical layer (configs, code stubs), exploration graph, and grounded evidence. Use when ingesting a paper or codebase into a structured, machine-executable knowledge package, building an ARA from scratch, or converting research outputs into a falsifiable, agent-traversable form.

ara-research-manager

Records research provenance as a post-task epilogue, scanning conversation history at the end of a coding or research session to extract decisions, experiments, dead ends, claims, heuristics, and pivots, and writing them into the ara/ directory with user-vs-AI provenance tags. Use as a session epilogue — never during execution — to maintain a faithful, auditable trace of how a research project actually evolved.

ara-rigor-reviewer

Performs ARA Seal Level 2 semantic epistemic review on Agent-Native Research Artifacts, scoring six dimensions (evidence relevance, falsifiability, scope calibration, argument coherence, exploration integrity, methodological rigor) and producing a constructive, severity-ranked report with a Strong Accept-to-Reject recommendation. Use after Level 1 structural validation passes, when an ARA needs an objective epistemic critique before publication or release.

autogpt-agents

Autonomous AI agent platform for building and deploying continuous agents. Use when creating visual workflow agents, deploying persistent autonomous agents, or building complex multi-step AI automation systems.

awq-quantization

Activation-aware weight quantization for 4-bit LLM compression with 3x speedup and minimal accuracy loss. Use when deploying large models (7B-70B) on limited GPU memory, when you need faster inference than GPTQ with better accuracy preservation, or for instruction-tuned and multimodal models. MLSys 2024 Best Paper Award winner.

blip-2-vision-language

Vision-language pre-training framework bridging frozen image encoders and LLMs. Use when you need image captioning, visual question answering, image-text retrieval, or multimodal chat with state-of-the-art zero-shot performance.

brainstorming-research-ideas

Guides researchers through structured ideation frameworks to discover high-impact research directions. Use when exploring new problem spaces, pivoting between projects, or seeking novel angles on existing work.

constitutional-ai

Anthropic's method for training harmless AI through self-improvement. Two-phase approach - supervised learning with self-critique/revision, then RLAIF (RL from AI Feedback). Use for safety alignment, reducing harmful outputs without human labels. Powers Claude's safety system.

creative-thinking-for-research

Applies cognitive science frameworks for creative thinking to CS and AI research ideation. Use when seeking genuinely novel research directions by leveraging combinatorial creativity, analogical reasoning, constraint manipulation, and other empirically grounded creative strategies.

crewai-multi-agent

Multi-agent orchestration framework for autonomous AI collaboration. Use when building teams of specialized agents working together on complex tasks, when you need role-based agent collaboration with memory, or for production workflows requiring sequential/hierarchical execution. Built without LangChain dependencies for lean, fast execution.

deepspeed

Expert guidance for distributed training with DeepSpeed - ZeRO optimization stages, pipeline parallelism, FP16/BF16/FP8, 1-bit Adam, sparse attention

evaluating-code-models

Evaluates code generation models across HumanEval, MBPP, MultiPL-E, and 15+ benchmarks with pass@k metrics. Use when benchmarking code models, comparing coding abilities, testing multi-language support, or measuring code generation quality. Industry standard from BigCode Project used by HuggingFace leaderboards.

evaluating-cosmos-policy

Evaluates NVIDIA Cosmos Policy on LIBERO and RoboCasa simulation environments. Use when setting up cosmos-policy for robot manipulation evaluation, running headless GPU evaluations with EGL rendering, or profiling inference latency on cluster or local GPU machines.

evolving-ai-agents

Provides guidance for automatically evolving and optimizing AI agents across any domain using LLM-driven evolution algorithms. Use when building self-improving agents, optimizing agent prompts and skills against benchmarks, or implementing automated agent evaluation loops.

experiment-tracking-swanlab

Provides guidance for experiment tracking with SwanLab. Use when you need open-source run tracking, local or self-hosted dashboards, and lightweight media logging for ML workflows.

fine-tuning-openvla-oft

Fine-tunes and evaluates OpenVLA-OFT and OpenVLA-OFT+ policies for robot action generation with continuous action heads, LoRA adaptation, and FiLM conditioning on LIBERO simulation and ALOHA real-world setups. Use when reproducing OpenVLA-OFT paper results, training custom VLA action heads (L1 or diffusion), deploying server-client inference for ALOHA, or debugging normalization, LoRA merge, and cross-GPU issues.

fine-tuning-serving-openpi

Fine-tune and serve Physical Intelligence OpenPI models (pi0, pi0-fast, pi0.5) using JAX or PyTorch backends for robot policy inference across ALOHA, DROID, and LIBERO environments. Use when adapting pi0 models to custom datasets, converting JAX checkpoints to PyTorch, running policy inference servers, or debugging norm stats and GPU memory issues.

gguf-quantization

GGUF format and llama.cpp quantization for efficient CPU/GPU inference. Use when deploying models on consumer hardware, Apple Silicon, or when needing flexible quantization from 2-8 bit without GPU requirements.

gptq

Post-training 4-bit quantization for LLMs with minimal accuracy loss. Use for deploying large models (70B, 405B) on consumer GPUs, when you need 4× memory reduction with <2% perplexity degradation, or for faster inference (3-4× speedup) vs FP16. Integrates with transformers and PEFT for QLoRA fine-tuning.

grpo-rl-training

Expert guidance for GRPO/RL fine-tuning with TRL for reasoning and task-specific model training

hqq-quantization

Half-Quadratic Quantization for LLMs without calibration data. Use when quantizing models to 4/3/2-bit precision without needing calibration datasets, for fast quantization workflows, or when deploying with vLLM or HuggingFace Transformers.

implementing-llms-litgpt

Implements and trains LLMs using Lightning AI's LitGPT with 20+ pretrained architectures (Llama, Gemma, Phi, Qwen, Mistral). Use when need clean model implementations, educational understanding of architectures, or production fine-tuning with LoRA/QLoRA. Single-file implementations, no abstraction layers.

knowledge-distillation

Compress large language models using knowledge distillation from teacher to student models. Use when deploying smaller models with retained performance, transferring GPT-4 capabilities to open-source models, or reducing inference costs. Covers temperature scaling, soft targets, reverse KLD, logit distillation, and MiniLLM training strategies.

langchain

Framework for building LLM-powered applications with agents, chains, and RAG. Supports multiple providers (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google), 500+ integrations, ReAct agents, tool calling, memory management, and vector store retrieval. Use for building chatbots, question-answering systems, autonomous agents, or RAG applications. Best for rapid prototyping and production deployments.

langsmith-observability

LLM observability platform for tracing, evaluation, and monitoring. Use when debugging LLM applications, evaluating model outputs against datasets, monitoring production systems, or building systematic testing pipelines for AI applications.

llama-factory

Expert guidance for fine-tuning LLMs with LLaMA-Factory - WebUI no-code, 100+ models, 2/3/4/5/6/8-bit QLoRA, multimodal support

llamaguard

Meta's 7-8B specialized moderation model for LLM input/output filtering. 6 safety categories - violence/hate, sexual content, weapons, substances, self-harm, criminal planning. 94-95% accuracy. Deploy with vLLM, HuggingFace, Sagemaker. Integrates with NeMo Guardrails.

llamaindex

Data framework for building LLM applications with RAG. Specializes in document ingestion (300+ connectors), indexing, and querying. Features vector indices, query engines, agents, and multi-modal support. Use for document Q&A, chatbots, knowledge retrieval, or building RAG pipelines. Best for data-centric LLM applications.

long-context

Extend context windows of transformer models using RoPE, YaRN, ALiBi, and position interpolation techniques. Use when processing long documents (32k-128k+ tokens), extending pre-trained models beyond original context limits, or implementing efficient positional encodings. Covers rotary embeddings, attention biases, interpolation methods, and extrapolation strategies for LLMs.

mamba-architecture

State-space model with O(n) complexity vs Transformers' O(n²). 5× faster inference, million-token sequences, no KV cache. Selective SSM with hardware-aware design. Mamba-1 (d_state=16) and Mamba-2 (d_state=128, multi-head). Models 130M-2.8B on HuggingFace.

miles-rl-training

Provides guidance for enterprise-grade RL training using miles, a production-ready fork of slime. Use when training large MoE models with FP8/INT4, needing train-inference alignment, or requiring speculative RL for maximum throughput.

ml-paper-writing

Write publication-ready ML/AI papers for NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, ACL, AAAI, COLM. Use when drafting papers from research repos, structuring arguments, verifying citations, or preparing camera-ready submissions. For systems venues (OSDI, NSDI, ASPLOS, SOSP), use systems-paper-writing instead.

ml-training-recipes

Battle-tested PyTorch training recipes for all domains — LLMs, vision, diffusion, medical imaging, protein/drug discovery, spatial omics, genomics. Covers training loops, optimizer selection (AdamW, Muon), LR scheduling, mixed precision, debugging, and systematic experimentation. Use when training or fine-tuning neural networks, debugging loss spikes or OOM, choosing architectures, or optimizing GPU throughput.

mlflow

Track ML experiments, manage model registry with versioning, deploy models to production, and reproduce experiments with MLflow - framework-agnostic ML lifecycle platform

model-merging

Merge multiple fine-tuned models using mergekit to combine capabilities without retraining. Use when creating specialized models by blending domain-specific expertise (math + coding + chat), improving performance beyond single models, or experimenting rapidly with model variants. Covers SLERP, TIES-Merging, DARE, Task Arithmetic, linear merging, and production deployment strategies.

model-pruning

Reduce LLM size and accelerate inference using pruning techniques like Wanda and SparseGPT. Use when compressing models without retraining, achieving 50% sparsity with minimal accuracy loss, or enabling faster inference on hardware accelerators. Covers unstructured pruning, structured pruning, N:M sparsity, magnitude pruning, and one-shot methods.

moe-training

Train Mixture of Experts (MoE) models using DeepSpeed or HuggingFace. Use when training large-scale models with limited compute (5× cost reduction vs dense models), implementing sparse architectures like Mixtral 8x7B or DeepSeek-V3, or scaling model capacity without proportional compute increase. Covers MoE architectures, routing mechanisms, load balancing, expert parallelism, and inference optimization.

nanogpt

Educational GPT implementation in ~300 lines. Reproduces GPT-2 (124M) on OpenWebText. Clean, hackable code for learning transformers. By Andrej Karpathy. Perfect for understanding GPT architecture from scratch. Train on Shakespeare (CPU) or OpenWebText (multi-GPU).

nemo-evaluator-sdk

Evaluates LLMs across 100+ benchmarks from 18+ harnesses (MMLU, HumanEval, GSM8K, safety, VLM) with multi-backend execution. Use when needing scalable evaluation on local Docker, Slurm HPC, or cloud platforms. NVIDIA's enterprise-grade platform with container-first architecture for reproducible benchmarking.

nemo-guardrails

NVIDIA's runtime safety framework for LLM applications. Features jailbreak detection, input/output validation, fact-checking, hallucination detection, PII filtering, toxicity detection. Uses Colang 2.0 DSL for programmable rails. Production-ready, runs on T4 GPU.

nnsight-remote-interpretability

Provides guidance for interpreting and manipulating neural network internals using nnsight with optional NDIF remote execution. Use when needing to run interpretability experiments on massive models (70B+) without local GPU resources, or when working with any PyTorch architecture.

openrlhf-training

High-performance RLHF framework with Ray+vLLM acceleration. Use for PPO, GRPO, RLOO, DPO training of large models (7B-70B+). Built on Ray, vLLM, ZeRO-3. 2× faster than DeepSpeedChat with distributed architecture and GPU resource sharing.

phoenix-observability

Open-source AI observability platform for LLM tracing, evaluation, and monitoring. Use when debugging LLM applications with detailed traces, running evaluations on datasets, or monitoring production AI systems with real-time insights.

presenting-conference-talks

Generates conference presentation slides (Beamer LaTeX PDF and editable PPTX) from a compiled paper with speaker notes and talk script. Use when preparing oral talks, spotlight presentations, or invited talks for ML and systems conferences.

prompt-guard

Meta's 86M prompt injection and jailbreak detector. Filters malicious prompts and third-party data for LLM apps. 99%+ TPR, <1% FPR. Fast (<2ms GPU). Multilingual (8 languages). Deploy with HuggingFace or batch processing for RAG security.

pytorch-fsdp2

Adds PyTorch FSDP2 (fully_shard) to training scripts with correct init, sharding, mixed precision/offload config, and distributed checkpointing. Use when models exceed single-GPU memory or when you need DTensor-based sharding with DeviceMesh.

pyvene-interventions

Provides guidance for performing causal interventions on PyTorch models using pyvene's declarative intervention framework. Use when conducting causal tracing, activation patching, interchange intervention training, or testing causal hypotheses about model behavior.

quantizing-models-bitsandbytes

Quantizes LLMs to 8-bit or 4-bit for 50-75% memory reduction with minimal accuracy loss. Use when GPU memory is limited, need to fit larger models, or want faster inference. Supports INT8, NF4, FP4 formats, QLoRA training, and 8-bit optimizers. Works with HuggingFace Transformers.

ray-data

Scalable data processing for ML workloads. Streaming execution across CPU/GPU, supports Parquet/CSV/JSON/images. Integrates with Ray Train, PyTorch, TensorFlow. Scales from single machine to 100s of nodes. Use for batch inference, data preprocessing, multi-modal data loading, or distributed ETL pipelines.

ray-train

Distributed training orchestration across clusters. Scales PyTorch/TensorFlow/HuggingFace from laptop to 1000s of nodes. Built-in hyperparameter tuning with Ray Tune, fault tolerance, elastic scaling. Use when training massive models across multiple machines or running distributed hyperparameter sweeps.

rwkv-architecture

RNN+Transformer hybrid with O(n) inference. Linear time, infinite context, no KV cache. Train like GPT (parallel), infer like RNN (sequential). Linux Foundation AI project. Production at Windows, Office, NeMo. RWKV-7 (March 2025). Models up to 14B parameters.

sentence-transformers

Framework for state-of-the-art sentence, text, and image embeddings. Provides 5000+ pre-trained models for semantic similarity, clustering, and retrieval. Supports multilingual, domain-specific, and multimodal models. Use for generating embeddings for RAG, semantic search, or similarity tasks. Best for production embedding generation.

sentencepiece

Language-independent tokenizer treating text as raw Unicode. Supports BPE and Unigram algorithms. Fast (50k sentences/sec), lightweight (6MB memory), deterministic vocabulary. Used by T5, ALBERT, XLNet, mBART. Train on raw text without pre-tokenization. Use when you need multilingual support, CJK languages, or reproducible tokenization.

sglang

Fast structured generation and serving for LLMs with RadixAttention prefix caching. Use for JSON/regex outputs, constrained decoding, agentic workflows with tool calls, or when you need 5× faster inference than vLLM with prefix sharing. Powers 300,000+ GPUs at xAI, AMD, NVIDIA, and LinkedIn.

skypilot-multi-cloud-orchestration

Multi-cloud orchestration for ML workloads with automatic cost optimization. Use when you need to run training or batch jobs across multiple clouds, leverage spot instances with auto-recovery, or optimize GPU costs across providers.

speculative-decoding

Accelerate LLM inference using speculative decoding, Medusa multiple heads, and lookahead decoding techniques. Use when optimizing inference speed (1.5-3.6× speedup), reducing latency for real-time applications, or deploying models with limited compute. Covers draft models, tree-based attention, Jacobi iteration, parallel token generation, and production deployment strategies.

systems-paper-writing

Comprehensive guide for writing systems papers targeting OSDI, SOSP, ASPLOS, NSDI, and EuroSys. Provides paragraph-level structural blueprints, writing patterns, venue-specific checklists, reviewer guidelines, LaTeX templates, and conference deadlines. Use this skill for all systems conference paper writing.

tensorboard

Visualize training metrics, debug models with histograms, compare experiments, visualize model graphs, and profile performance with TensorBoard - Google's ML visualization toolkit

torchforge-rl-training

Provides guidance for PyTorch-native agentic RL using torchforge, Meta's library separating infra from algorithms. Use when you want clean RL abstractions, easy algorithm experimentation, or scalable training with Monarch and TorchTitan.

training-llms-megatron

Trains large language models (2B-462B parameters) using NVIDIA Megatron-Core with advanced parallelism strategies. Use when training models >1B parameters, need maximum GPU efficiency (47% MFU on H100), or require tensor/pipeline/sequence/context/expert parallelism. Production-ready framework used for Nemotron, LLaMA, DeepSeek.

transformer-lens-interpretability

Provides guidance for mechanistic interpretability research using TransformerLens to inspect and manipulate transformer internals via HookPoints and activation caching. Use when reverse-engineering model algorithms, studying attention patterns, or performing activation patching experiments.

verl-rl-training

Provides guidance for training LLMs with reinforcement learning using verl (Volcano Engine RL). Use when implementing RLHF, GRPO, PPO, or other RL algorithms for LLM post-training at scale with flexible infrastructure backends.