What's on the bench.
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
Guidance
Control LLM output with regex and grammars, guarantee valid JSON/XML/code generation, enforce structured formats, and build multi-step workflows with Guidance - Microsoft Research's constrained generation framework
Dspy
Build complex AI systems with declarative programming, optimize prompts automatically, create modular RAG systems and agents with DSPy - Stanford NLP's framework for systematic LM programming
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.
Qdrant Vector Search
High-performance vector similarity search engine for RAG and semantic search. Use when building production RAG systems requiring fast nearest neighbor search, hybrid search with filtering, or scalable vector storage with Rust-powered performance.
Pinecone
Managed vector database for production AI applications. Fully managed, auto-scaling, with hybrid search (dense + sparse), metadata filtering, and namespaces. Low latency (<100ms p95). Use for production RAG, recommendation systems, or semantic search at scale. Best for serverless, managed infrastructure.
Faiss
Facebook's library for efficient similarity search and clustering of dense vectors. Supports billions of vectors, GPU acceleration, and various index types (Flat, IVF, HNSW). Use for fast k-NN search, large-scale vector retrieval, or when you need pure similarity search without metadata. Best for high-performance applications.