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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.

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Apr 14, 2026Permutation Invariance Under Pressure: Robustness Testing of ZACH-ViT in Low-Data Medical ImagingThe integration of Vision Transformers into medical imaging has prompted a necessary reevaluation of architectural assumptions inherited from natural image processing. Standard Vision Transformers rely heavily on positio Apr 13, 2026Curating Intelligence: How SUPERNOVA Redefines Data Selection for General Reasoning in LLMsThe past year has witnessed remarkable advances in mathematical and coding reasoning through Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR). Models trained via RLVR on datasets like MATH and CodeForces have demons Apr 13, 2026Gauge-Invariant Spectral Transformers: Solving the Two-Body Problem of Graph Neural OperatorsThe migration of transformer architectures from sequential text to structured data has followed a clear trajectory. Following the dominance of Vision Transformers in computer vision and the extension to spatiotemporal do Apr 13, 2026When Better Retrieval Fails: The Component-Performance Gap in Policy-Focused RAG Systems Introduction The deployment of large language models in high-stakes domains has intensified interest in retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) as a mechanism for grounding outputs in authoritative sources. For AI governan Apr 13, 2026The Limits of Language Supervision in Fine-Grained Temporal UnderstandingSurgical video analysis sits at a critical intersection of computer vision and healthcare, where the stakes of misclassification extend far beyond academic benchmarks. A missed phase transition or incorrect action label Apr 13, 2026Geometry as Scaffold: Rethinking 3D Scene Editing Through Deterministic Constraints and Generative RefinementIn surgical oncology, a resection never begins with the scalpel. Instead, surgeons first establish a stereotactic frame, anchoring their instruments to explicit anatomical coordinates derived from 3D imaging. Only after Apr 13, 2026In-Context Meta-Learning as a Path to Universal Brain Decoding Introduction Visual decoding from functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) has emerged as one of the most demanding validation tasks for both neuroscience and artificial intelligence. The challenge lies not merely i Apr 13, 2026From Episodic Memory to Clinical Expertise: Joint Optimization in Self-Learning Diagnostic Agents The Gap Between Medical Knowledge and Clinical Experience Medical education produces a familiar paradox. Students emerge from training with vast declarative knowledge, yet true diagnostic competence develops only throug Apr 13, 2026When the City Teaches the Car: Infrastructure as Distributed Supervision for Autonomous Perception The Annotation Bottleneck in Scaling Autonomous Driving The expansion of autonomous vehicle deployments across diverse geographic regions exposes a fundamental tension in modern robotics. While deep learning models for Apr 13, 2026The Sparse Future of Fine-Tuning: How Mixture of Experts Redefines Parameter Efficiency Introduction The escalating scale of language models has created a fundamental tension. While larger models demonstrate increasingly sophisticated capabilities, the cost of adapting them to specific downstream tasks thr Apr 13, 2026Beyond the Single Model: Routing for Diversity in Large Language Model EnsemblesWhen we ask a language model to generate a creative story, suggest a project title, or brainstorm solutions to an open ended problem, we rarely want a single answer. We want a spectrum of valid, high quality possibilitie Apr 13, 2026When Better Judges Enable Better Deception: A Closer Look at Reasoning LLMs-as-Judges The Promise and Peril of Scalable Supervision The recent success of Reinforcement Learning from Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) in producing capable reasoning models has created a template that the field desperately wants to Apr 13, 2026Compositional Lifelong Learning through the Lens of Formal Methods Introduction Lifelong reinforcement learning represents one of the most challenging frontiers in artificial intelligence. Unlike standard multi-task learning where tasks are presented simultaneously, lifelong learning r Apr 12, 2026Physics-Aligned Simulation as a Data Scaler for Deformable ManipulationDeformable object manipulation represents a fundamental frontier in robotics, yet it remains stubbornly data intensive. Unlike rigid objects, garments and soft materials exhibit complex co-evolution of shape, contact, an Apr 12, 2026Weight-Informed Self-Explaining Clustering: Progress and the Persistent Paradox of Contextual Relevance Introduction Mixed-type tabular data remains the dominant substrate of real-world analytics, encompassing electronic health records, financial transactions, and demographic surveys where numerical vitals coexist with ca Apr 12, 2026The Parallelogram Hypothesis Revisited: Why Language Models Outperform Humans at Analogical Completion Introduction The four term word analogy, formalized as A:B::C:D, has served as a cornerstone of cognitive science research for decades. The canonical example, king:queen::man:woman, appears deceptively simple, yet it ca Apr 12, 2026Serendipity by Design: When Cross-Domain Analogies Boost Human Creativity but Leave LLMs Unchanged Introduction The invention of Velcro famously began with a dog and a hike. When George de Mestral examined burrs clinging to his pet's fur in 1941, he discovered the microscopic hooks that would eventually secure everyt Apr 12, 2026The Physics of Absence: Why Video Object Removal Requires World ModelsThe task seems straightforward. Given a video and a mask, remove the object and fill the pixels behind it. For decades, computer vision treated this as an inpainting problem, a matter of texture synthesis and boundary bl