AI Research Skills Library

The most comprehensive open-source skills library enabling AI agents to autonomously conduct AI research — from idea to paper

98 Skills Powering AI Research in 2026

View All 23 Categories

Autoresearch (1)	Ideation (2)	ML Paper Writing (2)
Model Architecture (5)	Fine-Tuning (4)	Post-Training (8)
Distributed Training (6)	Optimization (6)	Inference (4)
Tokenization (2)	Data Processing (2)	Evaluation (3)
Safety & Alignment (4)	Agents (4)	RAG (5)
Multimodal (7)	Prompt Engineering (4)	MLOps (3)
Observability (2)	Infrastructure (3)	Mech Interp (4)
Emerging Techniques (6)	Agent-Native Research Artifact (3)

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Table of Contents

• Our Mission
• Path Towards AI Research Agent
• Available AI Research Engineering Skills
• Demos
• Skill Structure
• Roadmap
• Repository Structure
• Use Cases
• Contributors
• Citation
• Community

Our Mission

We enable AI agents to autonomously conduct AI research — from literature survey and idea generation through experiment execution to paper writing. The library provides both the research orchestration layer (autoresearch, ideation, paper writing) and the engineering skills (training, evaluation, deployment) needed at each stage.

System diagram of an AI research agent

Path Towards AI Research Agent

Modern AI research requires mastering dozens of specialized tools and frameworks. AI Researchers spend more time debugging infrastructure than testing hypotheses — slowing the pace of scientific discovery. We provide a comprehensive skills library that enables AI agents to autonomously conduct the full research lifecycle — from brainstorming ideas to writing the paper.

• Autonomous Research - The autoresearch skill orchestrates the entire research workflow using a two-loop architecture, routing to domain skills as needed
• Specialized Expertise - Each domain skill provides deep, production-ready knowledge of a specific framework (Megatron-LM, vLLM, TRL, etc.)
• End-to-End Coverage - 98 skills spanning the full AI research lifecycle, from ideation and literature survey to experiments and paper writing
• Research-Grade Quality - Documentation sourced from official repos, real GitHub issues, and battle-tested production workflows

Available AI Research Engineering Skills

Quality over quantity: Each skill provides comprehensive, expert-level guidance with real code examples, troubleshooting guides, and production-ready workflows.

📦 Quick Install (Recommended)

For humans — interactive installer with one command:

npx @orchestra-research/ai-research-skills

For AI agents — point your agent to the welcome doc and it handles the rest:

Read https://www.orchestra-research.com/ai-research-skills/welcome.md and follow the instructions to install and use AI Research Skills.

This installs all 98 skills, loads the autoresearch orchestration layer, and starts autonomous research.

What the installer does

• Auto-detects your installed coding agents (Claude Code, Hermes Agent, OpenCode, Qoder, Cursor, Gemini CLI, etc.)
• Installs skills to ~/.orchestra/skills/ with symlinks to each agent (falls back to copy on Windows)
• Offers everything, quickstart bundle, by category, or individual skills
• Updates installed skills with latest versions
• Uninstalls all or selected skills

CLI Commands

# Interactive installer (recommended)
npx @orchestra-research/ai-research-skills

# Direct commands
npx @orchestra-research/ai-research-skills list      # View installed skills
npx @orchestra-research/ai-research-skills update    # Update installed skills

Claude Code Marketplace (Alternative)

Install skill categories directly using the Claude Code CLI:

# Add the marketplace
/plugin marketplace add orchestra-research/AI-research-SKILLs

# Install by category (23 categories available)
/plugin install fine-tuning@ai-research-skills        # Axolotl, LLaMA-Factory, PEFT, Unsloth
/plugin install post-training@ai-research-skills      # TRL, GRPO, OpenRLHF, SimPO, verl, slime, miles, torchforge
/plugin install inference-serving@ai-research-skills  # vLLM, TensorRT-LLM, llama.cpp, SGLang
/plugin install distributed-training@ai-research-skills
/plugin install optimization@ai-research-skills

All 23 Categories (98 Skills)

Category	Skills	Included
Autoresearch	1	Autonomous research orchestration — central layer that manages the full lifecycle and routes to all other skills
Ideation	2	Research Brainstorming, Creative Thinking
ML Paper Writing	2	ML Paper Writing (LaTeX templates, citation verification), Academic Plotting
Model Architecture	5	LitGPT, Mamba, NanoGPT, RWKV, TorchTitan
Tokenization	2	HuggingFace Tokenizers, SentencePiece
Fine-Tuning	4	Axolotl, LLaMA-Factory, PEFT, Unsloth
Mech Interp	4	TransformerLens, SAELens, pyvene, nnsight
Data Processing	2	NeMo Curator, Ray Data
Post-Training	8	TRL, GRPO, OpenRLHF, SimPO, verl, slime, miles, torchforge
Safety	4	Constitutional AI, LlamaGuard, NeMo Guardrails, Prompt Guard
Distributed	6	DeepSpeed, FSDP, Accelerate, Megatron-Core, Lightning, Ray Train
Infrastructure	3	Modal, Lambda Labs, SkyPilot
Optimization	6	Flash Attention, bitsandbytes, GPTQ, AWQ, HQQ, GGUF
Evaluation	3	lm-eval-harness, BigCode, NeMo Evaluator
Inference	4	vLLM, TensorRT-LL