AI Research Skills Library

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

---

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.

All 23 Categories (98 Skills)

Demos

All 98 skills in this repo are automatically synced to Orchestra Research, where you can add them to your projects with one click and use them with AI research agents.

See skills in action → demos/

We maintain a curated collection of demo repositories showing how to use skills for real AI research tasks:

Featured Demos: Two papers produced entirely by AI agents using the autoresearch skill. The Norm Heterogeneity paper demonstrates autonomous research pivoting — the agent refuted its own hypothesis and discovered a stronger finding. The RL Brain Scan paper demonstrates multi-skill orchestration — the agent trained RL models, analyzed internals with interpretability tools, and synthesized the insight that “DPO is rank-1 alignment.” Both papers written end-to-end by the agent.

Skill Structure

Each skill follows a battle-tested format for maximum usefulness:

skill-name/
├── SKILL.md                    # Quick reference (50-150 lines)
│   ├── Metadata (name, description, version)
│   ├── When to use this skill
│   ├── Quick patterns & examples
│   └── Links to references
│
├── references/                 # Deep documentation (300KB+)
│   ├── README.md              # From GitHub/official docs
│   ├── api.md                 # API reference
│   ├── tutorials.md           # Step-by-step guides
│   ├── issues.md              # Real GitHub issues & solutions
│   ├── releases.md            # Version history & breaking changes
│   └── file_structure.md      # Codebase navigation
│
├── scripts/                    # Helper scripts (optional)
└── assets/                     # Templates & examples (optional)

Roadmap

The library spans 98 comprehensive skills across the full AI research lifecycle. See our detailed roadmap for the complete development plan.

View Full Roadmap →

Repository Structure

claude-ai-research-skills/
├── README.md                    ← You are here
├── CONTRIBUTING.md              ← Contribution guide
├── demos/                       ← Curated demo gallery (links to demo repos)
├── docs/
├── 0-autoresearch-skill/        (1 skill ✓ - Autonomous research orchestration)
├── 01-model-architecture/       (5 skills ✓ - LitGPT, Mamba, RWKV, NanoGPT, TorchTitan)
├── 02-tokenization/             (2 skills ✓ - HuggingFace Tokenizers, SentencePiece)
├── 03-fine-tuning/              (4 skills ✓ - Axolotl, LLaMA-Factory, Unsloth, PEFT)
├── 04-mechanistic-interpretability/ (4 skills ✓ - TransformerLens, SAELens, pyvene, nnsight)
├── 05-data-processing/          (2 skills ✓ - Ray Data, NeMo Curator)
├── 06-post-training/            (8 skills ✓ - TRL, GRPO, OpenRLHF, SimPO, verl, slime, miles, torchforge)
├── 07-safety-alignment/         (4 skills ✓ - Constitutional AI, LlamaGuard, NeMo Guardrails, Prompt Guard)
├── 08-distributed-training/     (6 skills ✓ - Megatron-Core, DeepSpeed, FSDP, Accelerate, Lightning, Ray Train)
├── 09-infrastructure/           (3 skills ✓ - Modal, SkyPilot, Lambda Labs)
├── 10-optimization/             (6 skills ✓ - Flash Attention, bitsandbytes, GPTQ, AWQ, HQQ, GGUF)
├── 11-evaluation/               (3 skills ✓ - lm-evaluation-harness, BigCode, NeMo Evaluator)
├── 12-inference-serving/        (4 skills ✓ - vLLM, TensorRT-LLM, llama.cpp, SGLang)
├── 13-mlops/                    (3 skills ✓ - Weights & Biases, MLflow, TensorBoard)
├── 14-agents/                   (4 skills ✓ - LangChain, LlamaIndex, CrewAI, AutoGPT)
├── 15-rag/                      (5 skills ✓ - Chroma, FAISS, Sentence Transformers, Pinecone, Qdrant)
├── 16-prompt-engineering/       (4 skills ✓ - DSPy, Instructor, Guidance, Outlines)
├── 17-observability/            (2 skills ✓ - LangSmith, Phoenix)
├── 18-multimodal/               (7 skills ✓ - CLIP, Whisper, LLaVA, Stable Diffusion, SAM, BLIP-2, AudioCraft)
├── 19-emerging-techniques/      (6 skills ✓ - MoE, Model Merging, Long Context, Speculative Decoding, Distillation, Pruning)
├── 20-ml-paper-writing/         (2 skills ✓ - ML Paper Writing with LaTeX templates, Academic Plotting)
├── 21-research-ideation/           (2 skills ✓ - Research Brainstorming, Creative Thinking)
├── 22-agent-native-research-artifact/ (3 skills ✓ - ARA Compiler, Research Manager, Rigor Reviewer)
└── packages/ai-research-skills/ (npm package for one-command installation)

Use Cases

For Researchers

“I need to fine-tune Llama 3 with custom data” → 03-fine-tuning/axolotl/ - YAML configs, 100+ model support

For ML Engineers

“How do I optimize inference latency?” → 12-inference-serving/vllm/ - PagedAttention, batching

For Students

“I want to learn how transformers work” → 01-model-architecture/litgpt/ - Clean implementations

For Teams

“We need to scale training to 100 GPUs” → 08-distributed-training/deepspeed/ - ZeRO stages, 3D parallelism

License

MIT License - See LICENSE for details.

Note: Individual skills may reference libraries with different licenses. Please check each project’s license before use.

Citation

If you use AI Research Skills in your work or find it helpful for a publication, we’d appreciate a citation:

BibTeX

@software{ai_research_skills,
  title     = {AI Research Skills Library},
  author    = {{Orchestra Research}},
  year      = {2025},
  url       = {https://github.com/orchestra-research/AI-research-SKILLs},
  note      = {Open-source skills library enabling AI agents to autonomously conduct AI research}
}

APA

Orchestra Research. (2025). AI Research Skills Library [Computer software]. https://github.com/orchestra-research/AI-research-SKILLs

Chicago

Orchestra Research. “AI Research Skills Library.” GitHub, 2025. https://github.com/orchestra-research/AI-research-SKILLs.

IEEE

Orchestra Research, “AI Research Skills Library,” 2025. [Online]. Available: https://github.com/orchestra-research/AI-research-SKILLs

Tip: You can also click “Cite this repository” in the GitHub sidebar for auto-formatted citations.

Acknowledgments

Built with:

• Claude Code - AI pair programming
• Skill Seeker - Automated doc scraping
• Open Source AI Community - For amazing tools and docs

Special thanks to:

• EleutherAI, HuggingFace, NVIDIA, Lightning AI, Meta AI, Anthropic
• All researchers who maintain excellent documentation

Contributors

Thanks to all the people who have contributed to the AI Research Skills Library:

We welcome contributions from the AI research community! See CONTRIBUTING.md for detailed guidelines on:

• Adding new skills
• Improving existing skills
• Quality standards and best practices
• Submission process

Recent Updates

Community

Join our community to stay updated, ask questions, and connect with other AI researchers:

• SkillEvolve Meta-Skill - Connect your agent to the collective intelligence of the community. Captures techniques discovered during sessions and shares them back as curated skills.
• Slack Community - Chat with the team and other users
• Twitter/X - Follow for updates and announcements
• LinkedIn - Connect professionally

Star History