Blog

Notes on teaching robots new tricks

How the studio works, why tiny robots come first, what the checks catch, and how a policy gets from simulation to a servo.

workflowopen-duck-miniSep 29, 2026 · 6 min readFrom a sentence to a walking duck: how kualia turns a plain-language brief into a training taskA walk through the whole kualia workflow, from a one-sentence brief to an ONNX policy, using the Open Duck Mini and a small ramp.Read the post

Sep 27, 2026 · 5 minWhy we start with tiny robotsDesk-sized robots train on CPU in minutes to hours, cost little to own and cross the sim-to-real gap without heroics. That is why kualia's shelf starts with them.

Sep 25, 2026 · 6 min13 checks before a single training stepalia writes the training task, but it does not get to grade its own work. Every task passes 13 sandbox checks before training can start. Here is what each one catches.

Sep 23, 2026 · 5 minFrom simulation to servo: running your ONNX policy on a real SO-101What is inside a kualia ONNX export, how to read its metadata, a minimal onnxruntime loop for the SO-101, and the sim-to-real checklist before you power the servos.

Sep 21, 2026 · 5 minLet your coding agent train the robotkualia is a remote MCP server. Point Claude Code, Cursor or Codex at it and your agent can pick a robot, build the task, train it and fetch the ONNX policy from your editor.

Research digest

Short reads on new robotics and AI papers, written by our research assistant and reviewed before publishing. 1,060 so far.

Page 33 of 59

Apr 15, 2026Beyond Parameter Regularization: How Demonstration-Guided Exploration Reshapes Continual Reinforcement LearningReinforcement learning agents have achieved remarkable proficiency in static domains where the underlying dynamics remain fixed throughout training. However, deployment in real world scenarios inevitably involves non-sta Apr 15, 2026Beyond Static Snapshots: Dynamic Belief Graphs for Causal Theory of Mind ReasoningDuring a wildfire evacuation, human behavior rarely follows simple stimulus-response patterns. Residents may see flames yet delay departure for hours, seeking additional confirmation from neighbors or official channels. Apr 15, 2026Spatial Reasoning at Silicon Scale: How Vision-Language Models Are Reshaping Chip Floorplanning The Generalization Crisis in Automated Chip Design The physical design of integrated circuits represents one of the most stubbornly difficult optimization problems in computer engineering. Macro placement, the strategic Apr 15, 2026LAMP: Extracting 3D Manipulation Priors from 2D Image EditingThe robotics community has long grappled with a fundamental paradox: while 2D foundation models demonstrate remarkable understanding of spatial relationships and object interactions, translating this knowledge into preci Apr 15, 2026TETO and the Democratization of Sensor Learning: Why We May Not Need Synthetic Data AnymoreThe recent work on TETO: Tracking Events with Teacher Observation for Motion Estimation and Frame Interpolation by Yang et al. has generated significant attention for its impressive technical results. The authors demonst Apr 15, 2026The Discrete Charm of the MLP: Why Transformer Feed-Forward Layers Act Like Switchboards, Not SplinesThe standard theoretical framework for understanding multilayer perceptrons, particularly within transformer architectures, treats them as smooth function approximators. Drawing from the universal approximation theorem a Apr 15, 2026 Apr 15, 2026PackForcing: Rethinking the Training-Generation Length Paradigm in Video DiffusionThe conventional wisdom in video generation has long held that longer videos require training on longer sequences. This intuition seems almost self-evident: how can a model generate what it has never seen? Yet a new pape Apr 14, 2026SOMA and the Unification of Parametric Human Body Models: From Quadratic to Linear ComplexityThe proliferation of parametric human body models over the past decade has created a paradox. While SMPL and its successors provide increasingly sophisticated representations of human morphology, from SMPL-X's expressive Apr 14, 2026Forensic Signals in Frozen Representations: Training-Free Detection of Partial Audio Deepfakes Introduction The threat landscape of audio manipulation has shifted from crude splicing detectable by spectral artifacts to sophisticated partial deepfakes where synthesized segments are seamlessly embedded within authe Apr 14, 2026The Asymmetric Computational Geometry of Video Diffusion: An Analysis of Calibrated Sparse Attention The Attention Bottleneck in Spatiotemporal Generation The transition from image to video generation represents more than a quantitative increase in pixels. It constitutes a fundamental shift in computational geometry. W Apr 14, 2026Nonstandard Errors in AI Agents: When Foundation Models Disagree on Empirical Facts Introduction The replication crisis in empirical research has taught us that science is far more path dependent than we once assumed. When twenty nine teams analyzed identical soccer data to test for racial bias in refe Apr 14, 2026ReCoSplat and the Analysis-by-Synthesis Loop: Rethinking Conditioning in Autoregressive 3D ReconstructionThe transition from offline 3D reconstruction to online, sequential processing represents one of the most consequential shifts in computer vision. While feed-forward models have mastered the art of reconstructing static Apr 14, 2026Universal Hypernetworks and the Emergence of Recursive Weight Space Introduction Hypernetworks have long promised to compress the process of neural network training into a single forward pass, yet they have historically remained imprisoned by the very architectures they seek to generate Apr 14, 2026Reset-Free Lifelong Learning with Skill-Space Planning: Escaping the Episode Reset TrapReinforcement learning in the laboratory operates under a convenient fiction. When an agent fails, we reset the environment. When the task changes, we reinitialize. This episodic framing has produced remarkable successes Apr 14, 2026EventHub: Rethinking Event-Based Stereo Through Proxy Data GenerationThe asynchronous, high dynamic range nature of event cameras has long positioned them as superior alternatives to frame-based imaging in scenarios involving fast motion or extreme lighting variations. Yet despite their t Apr 14, 2026AgentGL and the Topology-Aware Agent: Reinforcement Learning for Dynamic Graph Reasoning Introduction Large Language Models have reached an inflection point where their parametric knowledge, vast as it may be, increasingly constrains their utility in specialized, evolving domains. The response has been a sh Apr 14, 2026Entropic Regularization and Reinforcement Learning: Rethinking Neural Architectures for the Traveling Salesman Problem Introduction The Traveling Salesman Problem remains the canonical testbed for combinatorial optimization algorithms. Despite decades of research producing exact solvers such as Concorde and LKH that can optimally solve