What's on the bench.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Whisper
OpenAI's general-purpose speech recognition model. Supports 99 languages, transcription, translation to English, and language identification. Six model sizes from tiny (39M params) to large (1550M params). Use for speech-to-text, podcast transcription, or multilingual audio processing. Best for robust, multilingual ASR.
Stable Diffusion Image Generation
State-of-the-art text-to-image generation with Stable Diffusion models via HuggingFace Diffusers. Use when generating images from text prompts, performing image-to-image translation, inpainting, or building custom diffusion pipelines.
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.
Llava
Large Language and Vision Assistant. Enables visual instruction tuning and image-based conversations. Combines CLIP vision encoder with Vicuna/LLaMA language models. Supports multi-turn image chat, visual question answering, and instruction following. Use for vision-language chatbots or image understanding tasks. Best for conversational image analysis.
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.
Clip
OpenAI's model connecting vision and language. Enables zero-shot image classification, image-text matching, and cross-modal retrieval. Trained on 400M image-text pairs. Use for image search, content moderation, or vision-language tasks without fine-tuning. Best for general-purpose image understanding.
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.
Audiocraft Audio Generation
PyTorch library for audio generation including text-to-music (MusicGen) and text-to-sound (AudioGen). Use when you need to generate music from text descriptions, create sound effects, or perform melody-conditioned music generation.
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.
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.
Outlines
Guarantee valid JSON/XML/code structure during generation, use Pydantic models for type-safe outputs, support local models (Transformers, vLLM), and maximize inference speed with Outlines - dottxt.ai's structured generation library