Use for VSS alert workflows — real-time monitoring, Alert-Bridge subscriptions, Slack notifications, incident queries, camera onboarding. Not for non-alert analytics.

Use this skill when deploying, operating, or integrating the VSS 3.2 GA RT-Embed Video Embedding microservice. Covers Docker Compose bring-up, GPU and storage prerequisites, the `/v1` REST API (file uploads, text and video embeddings, live RTSP streams, health and metrics), Redis/Kafka/OTel integration, common failure modes, and teardown.

Use to select, configure, deploy, verify, debug, or tear down a VSS profile (base, search, lvs, warehouse, edge). Not for standalone microservices — use the vss-deploy-* skill.

Expert cuTile programming assistant. Write high-performance GPU kernels using cuTile's tile-based programming model with proper validation and optimization. Supports deep agent orchestration for complex multi-kernel tasks.

Use when adding, modifying, optimizing, or debugging CuTile autotuning code. Trigger signals: `exhaustive_search` / `replace_hints` / `hints_fn` / `cuda.tile.tune` in code, `autotune` in filenames, or correctness/performance issues in autotuned CuTile kernels. Covers: tune-once/cache/launch pattern, per-architecture configs (sm80–sm120), parameter space design (tile sizes, occupancy, num_ctas), and 7 common pitfalls with solutions.

Converts cuTile GPU kernels (@ct.kernel) to Triton (@triton.jit). Handles standard in-repo conversion, debugging (cudaErrorIllegalAddress, shape mismatch, numerical mismatch), and mapping cuTile idioms (ct.load/ct.store, ct.Constant, ct.launch) to Triton equivalents. Covers dual-kernel layout flags (e.g. transpose=True/False + autotune grid via META) per translations/advanced-patterns.md. Use when converting, porting, or translating cuTile kernels to Triton, or debugging existing Triton translations.

OneFormer for universal image segmentation. Unifies panoptic, instance, and semantic segmentation with a single architecture using task-conditioned queries. Use when training, evaluating, exporting, quantizing, or running inference for a TAO OneFormer model. Trigger phrases include "train OneFormer", "universal segmentation", "task-conditioned segmentation", "panoptic / instance / semantic in one model".

Mask Grounding DINO for grounded instance segmentation. Extends Grounding DINO with a mask-prediction head for open-set segmentation guided by text prompts. Use when training, evaluating, exporting, quantizing, or running inference for a TAO Mask-Grounding-DINO model. Trigger phrases include "train Mask Grounding DINO", "open-vocabulary segmentation", "text-prompted instance segmentation", "grounded mask DETR".

Mask2Former for universal image segmentation (panoptic, instance, and semantic). Transformer-based with masked attention for high-quality segmentation results. Use when training, evaluating, exporting, quantizing, or running inference for a TAO Mask2Former model. Trigger phrases include "train Mask2Former", "universal segmentation", "panoptic / instance / semantic segmentation", "masked-attention transformer segmenter".

Grounding DINO for open-set object detection. Combines DINO-style detection with a BERT text encoder for language-guided detection — detects objects described by text prompts without a fixed class vocabulary. Use when training, evaluating, exporting, quantizing, or running inference for a TAO Grounding DINO model. Trigger phrases include "train Grounding DINO", "open-vocabulary detection", "text-prompted detector", "language-guided object detection".

Stereo depth estimation using FoundationStereo. Predicts disparity maps from stereo image pairs for 3D reconstruction. Use when training, evaluating, exporting, or running inference for a TAO FoundationStereo model. Trigger phrases include "train stereo depth", "FoundationStereo", "stereo disparity estimation", "3D reconstruction from stereo".

CenterPose for keypoint / pose estimation. Detects object centers and regresses keypoint locations for 6-DoF object pose estimation. Use when training, evaluating, exporting, or running inference for a TAO CenterPose model. Trigger phrases include "train CenterPose", "6-DoF object pose", "keypoint estimation", "object pose regression".

BEVFusion for multi-sensor 3D object detection. Fuses LiDAR point clouds and camera images in bird's-eye-view (BEV) space, used in autonomous driving for robust 3D perception. Use when training, evaluating, or running inference for a TAO BEVFusion model. Trigger phrases include "train BEVFusion", "LiDAR + camera fusion", "BEV 3D detection", "multi-sensor 3D perception".

Host setup for TAO GPU backends. Checks and, after user approval, installs NVIDIA driver branch 580, CUDA Toolkit 13.0, and NVIDIA Container Toolkit 1.19.0 for Docker/local-Docker and Kubernetes GPU worker hosts. The `--check-only` path works on any Linux distribution; `--install` automates debian-family (Ubuntu/Debian/Pop!_OS/Mint/Zorin/Raspbian), rhel-family (Fedora/RHEL/Rocky/AlmaLinux), and suse-family (openSUSE/SLES) hosts, and prints actionable manual-install steps for everything else. Use when the user asks to "set up an NVIDIA GPU host", "check TAO Docker GPU runtime", or prepare a Kubernetes GPU worker for TAO.

TAO Execution SDK for submitting and monitoring GPU training jobs on supported platforms (Brev, SLURM, local Docker, Kubernetes). Use when the user wants to run TAO jobs through the SDK, get job tracking, S3 I/O wrapping, multi-node distributed training, or platform-specific features that docker-run can't provide. Trigger phrases include "use the TAO SDK", "call tao_sdk", "AutoMLRunner", "ActionWorkflow", "Job handles", "S3 I/O wrapping", "TAO platform run".

Kubernetes execution platform — submits TAO container jobs as single-pod k8s Jobs with NVIDIA GPU scheduling. Use when running on EKS / GKE / AKS / on-prem clusters with the NVIDIA GPU Operator installed, or when integrating TAO into an existing k8s-native ML platform.

Docker conventions for running NVIDIA GPU container workloads — NGC authentication, --gpus flag, mount patterns, env-var passthrough, container inspection, data-root relocation for split-disk hosts, and common error modes. Use when another skill requires running an nvcr.io container or any docker run command on a GPU host. Trigger keywords — docker, docker run, nvcr.io, NGC, --gpus, nvidia-container-toolkit, container image, docker login, docker pull.

Brev managed GPU instances with Docker support. Use when running TAO training, evaluation, or inference on Brev GPU instances, managing Brev deployments, or dispatching TAO jobs through the Brev CLI. Trigger phrases include "run on Brev", "Brev GPU instance", "submit job to Brev", "Brev CLI deployment".

Run AutoML / hyperparameter optimization (HPO) for NVIDIA TAO networks using AutoMLRunner. Handles algorithm selection (bayesian, hyperband, asha, bohb, llm, hybrid, autoresearch), WandB experiment tracking, job execution on any TAO SDK platform, result interpretation, and per-rec custom evaluation hooks. Use when the user mentions TAO AutoML, hyperparameter optimization, HPO, automl, automl_settings, AutoMLRunner, tao_automl, bayesian search, hyperband, ASHA, LLM-guided search, autoresearch, or wants to tune training hyperparameters for any TAO network. Platform-agnostic — runs on any SDK (Brev, SLURM, Kubernetes, Docker).

Runs the DEFT embed-then-mine workflow for VCN AOI iterations — embeds the gap-analysis target parquet, embeds a source pool, and mines nearest-neighbour source images for downstream augmentation. Use as the immediate next step after `tao-route-visual-changenet-samples` when expanding a real-image augmentation queue from the mining subset.