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Open Source
561 posts about Open Source. Every summary links to the original.
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Grabette: an open system to record robot-manipulation data
Grabette is an open, low-cost system for recording robot-manipulation data without requiring a robot, lab, or teleoperation rig. It uses a handheld gripper with a wide fisheye observation camera, an RGBD tracking camera, an IMU, and gripper encoders to capture synchronized demonstrations and recover camera-local 6-DoF Cartesian pose plus gripper state. Users save episodes on a Raspberry Pi, then select them in a browser dashboard for upload, RTAB-MAP SLAM, trajectory verification, and conversion into a LeRobot dataset on the Hugging Face Hub. The release also includes a motorized Gripette gripper and an example that trains a Diffusion Policy on 200 demonstrations and evaluates it on an OpenArm 7-DoF arm via gRPC, demonstrating the recording-to-training workflow.
Integrate NVIDIA Omniverse RTX Sensor Simulation Into Existing Apps
NVIDIA Omniverse libraries, included in NVIDIA Agent Toolkit, provide modular components for incorporating physical AI features into current tools and services. As part of this stack, the ovrtx prerelease library offers a lightweight C and Python SDK for real-time RTX sensor simulation and visualization using OpenUSD scenes. Host applications retain architectural and workflow control by stepping the renderer directly from their internal loops. Integration relies on ovstage for shared OpenUSD data management alongside RenderProducts and RenderVars to configure camera, lidar, radar, and semantic segmentation outputs. PTC Onshape Render Studio is exploring ovrtx to embed RTX rendering directly into cloud-native CAD and PDM workflows.
How Unity Catalog managed tables bring interoperability, performance, and unified governance to the Lakehouse
Unity Catalog external access to Unity Catalog managed Delta tables is now in Public Preview, allowing external engines to create, read, and write while governance remains centralized. The announcement addresses the previous multi-engine trade-off: external tables enabled access but lacked managed-table performance optimizations and governance guarantees. Catalog commits coordinate writes through Unity Catalog, making it the source of truth for table state and enabling safe external writes, multi-statement transactions, and auditing of external operations. Predictive Optimization cleans storage, collects query statistics, and selects Liquid clustering columns as query patterns change; the post says these capabilities can deliver up to 50% storage cost savings and 20x faster queries. Support includes Spark, Flink, Starburst, DuckDB, and StreamNative, with open APIs and Delta Kernel extending integrations across Databricks UC and UC OSS.
Newer Models, Same Advantage
DharmaOCR, a Brazilian Portuguese-focused OCR model, is evaluated against newer Mistral OCR4 and Unlimited-OCR systems on a Portuguese-only benchmark. The article attributes its performance to a two-stage training pipeline: supervised fine-tuning on varied Portuguese documents, followed by Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) using comparative output preferences. Fine-tuning concentrates model capacity on Brazilian Portuguese vocabulary, syntax, and document structures, while DPO targets repetitive or incoherent generation, reducing inference time and cost and improving stability according to the article. DharmaOCR scored 0.925, compared with 0.798 for Mistral OCR4 and 0.7587 for Unlimited-OCR, while examples from handwritten ENEM essays show the competitors misreading Brazilian names and phrases that DharmaOCR handled correctly. The conclusion is that newer architectures can raise absolute performance, but directing finite resources at one domain can preserve a measurable specialist advantage.
July 2026 newsletter
The July 2026 newsletter rounds up ClickHouse releases, community projects, benchmarks, engineering work, and upcoming events in real-time data warehousing. Version 26.6 adds hypothetical skip indexes, cascading refreshable materialized-view dependencies, experimental continuous queries, AI embedding functions, PNG output, CLI documentation, and geospatial improvements. A CostBench comparison running the full analytics path over 28 hours found better cost-performance for ClickHouse Cloud than Snowflake Interactive Tables, which required a continuously running refresh warehouse for pre-aggregated data. Other features cover conversational analytics with ClickHouse Cloud, LibreChat, and MCP; Postgres change-data capture through Debezium and Kafka; local agent queries with chDB; high-concurrency tuning; and Silk, whose fiber runtime targets lower I/O tail latency. Quick reads report ingestion, caching, security, and multi-tenant SQL developments.
Migrating from Apollo Tooling to GraphQL Codegen at Yelp
Yelp migrated its frontend React monorepo from the deprecated apollo-tooling to GraphQL Codegen to ensure ongoing maintenance and build reliability. Because the monorepo spans over 500 packages with thousands of generated type files and custom nested type imports, the Client Data team prioritized a transparent migration that avoided codebase-wide changes. The team rejected approaches requiring syntax updates or altered import paths, choosing instead to configure GraphQL Codegen and contribute upstream plugin changes so output structures and naming conventions matched the legacy output. Migrating packages incrementally through small pull requests enabled continuous feedback while allowing developers across dozens of teams to maintain their workflows without editing existing code. Completing the migration to GraphQL Codegen v6 simplified Yelp's build tooling, eliminated deprecated dependencies, and left upstream compatibility enhancements available for the wider open-source community.
Build a Multi-Camera 3D Tracking Application with NVIDIA DeepStream 9.1 Skills
NVIDIA DeepStream 9.1 introduces AutoMagicCalib and Multi-View 3D Tracking skills to resolve the limitations of single-camera 2D tracking and manual camera calibration in large-scale video analytics. Multi-View 3D Tracking projects detections into a shared 3D coordinate system, matching tracklets across cameras via MQTT and maintaining globally consistent object IDs. AutoMagicCalib automates camera intrinsic and extrinsic parameter estimation by analyzing object trajectories across video feeds, optionally using a Visual Geometry Grounded Transformer. These capabilities are integrated into 13 agentic skills that allow coding agents to set up, configure, and execute end-to-end vision AI pipelines from natural language prompts. Outputs include an on-screen display grid, bird's-eye view trajectories, and per-frame protobuf metadata streamed through Kafka.
Develop Lightweight USD Runtimes Faster with AI Agents
Building custom Universal Scene Description (USD) implementations traditionally required adapting large existing codebases to meet specific memory footprints, application binary interfaces (ABIs), or performance requirements. The nanousd-labs project introduces an alternative approach by using AI agents to generate lightweight USD runtimes directly from the Alliance for OpenUSD machine-readable USD Core Specification. Agents parse the specification section by section, write conforming code, and validate output against specification-derived tests under engineer guidance. Written in C++ with a public C API, nanousd functions as an independent data layer that handles parsing, composition, queries, and writing without rendering pixels. This methodology enables developers to regenerate runtimes for varying deployment constraints while maintaining standard compliance through reusable workflows and skill graphs.
Welcome Inkling by Thinking Machines
Thinking Machines Lab has released Inkling and the smaller Inkling-Small family as open multimodal models that accept image, text, and audio inputs. Inkling is described as a roughly 1T-parameter decoder-only Mixture-of-Experts model, with 975B total and 41B active parameters, a 1M-token context window, and training on 45 trillion multimodal tokens. Its architecture combines relative attention, alternating global and sliding-window attention, short convolution, shared experts, hierarchical image patchification, and discretized mel-spectrogram audio processing. The release includes BF16 and NVFP4 checkpoints, speculative MTP layers, day-zero support in Transformers, SGLang, vLLM, and llama.cpp, plus deployment configurations and interactive voice and image demos. Reported benchmarks show Inkling and Inkling-Small achieving strong but varied results across reasoning, coding, vision, audio, factuality, chat, and safety evaluations.
@clickhouse/rowbinary: when your library is also a parser compiler
ClickHouse's @clickhouse/rowbinary is a Node.js reader and writer for the RowBinary, RowBinaryWithNames, and RowBinaryWithNamesAndTypes formats, offering both a generic parser and an accompanying Agent Skill. RowBinary avoids per-row overhead but is difficult to consume in JavaScript because nested types, LEB128 varints, precision-sensitive DateTime64 values, and recursive self-describing types require extensive runtime dispatch; JSON alternatives can also round large UInt64 values. The package provides small, composable, monomorphizable reading primitives, while SKILL.md instructs a coding agent to assemble query-specific parsers with inlined operations and selected policies such as BigInt handling and array materialization. Generated parsers run 1.5–3.4x faster than composing library functions in loops, with a fixed-width benchmark parser reaching 3.41x faster, and produce reviewable source that can be tested and benchmarked like ordinary application code.
How to Run an Autoresearch Workflow with RL Agent Skills and NVIDIA NeMo
Setting up reinforcement learning workflows and running repetitive experimentation often consumes significant engineering time before meaningful metrics emerge. To address this, an autonomous autoresearch workflow uses a frontier coding agent running Codex with GPT 5.5 to manage NVIDIA NeMo RL and NeMo Gym on an NVIDIA Brev GPU instance. The agent executes full-stack setup, creates a novel NeMo Gym visual counting environment, tunes Qwen3-VL-2B-Instruct accuracy from 25.0% to 96.9%, and implements an off-policy reinforcement learning algorithm directly from a research paper. Reusable skills, including brev-etiquette, session-memory, and autoresearch, enforce local conventions and prevent context drift during long executions. This setup offloads environment configuration, dependency resolution, and experiment tracking while preserving human oversight for goals and strategy.
Extreme Event Likelihoods with Guided Generative Models
Estimating the likelihood of extreme, high-impact events using brute-force Monte Carlo simulations requires excessive model iterations for expensive physics-based climate models. While guided diffusion models steer generation toward rare events like tropical cyclones, oversampling distorts the true probability distribution. To address this, researchers guide the diffusion-based climate emulator NVIDIA cBottle toward specific events and compute log-odds ratios between guided and unguided distributions. Reweighting the guided samples via these odds ratios enables importance sampling under the original climate distribution. Implemented in NVIDIA Earth2Studio, this technique reduced standard error by 25% compared to simple Monte Carlo sampling when evaluating tropical cyclone states.
How to Evaluate General-Purpose Robot Policies for Real-World Deployment
Evaluating robotics foundation models accurately in simulation remains challenging due to visual domain overlap, benchmark saturation, diagnostic gaps, and small sample sizes. RoboLab addresses these deficiencies by providing a robot-agnostic simulation platform that supports rapid task creation and diagnostic evaluation suites. Tasks in RoboLab can be compiled across varying robot embodiments and target visual, procedural, and relational competencies. Statistical analysis using the Clopper-Pearson method reveals that narrowing the confidence interval around a 90 percent success rate from ten to two percentage points demands increasing rollouts from 70 to 1,030. Developed by NVIDIA Research, RoboLab powers the open-source Isaac Lab-Arena simulation framework to establish scalable evaluation for real-world robotic policies.
Accelerating End-to-End Co-Folding Performance with NVIDIA BioNeMo Agent Toolkit
Biomolecular structure prediction and co-folding pipelines encounter latency and memory ceilings during sequence alignment and multi-residue inference. NVIDIA addresses these constraints through the BioNeMo Agent Toolkit, which connects AI agents to accelerated biological computing components. The pipeline offloads multiple sequence alignment to MMseqs2-GPU, while cuEquivariance and the OpenFold3 NIM accelerate core geometric attention kernels to cut inference latency up to fourfold. To handle large molecular assemblies beyond single-GPU memory limits, the Fold-CP framework distributes context across multiple GPUs with O(N²/P) memory scaling. Together, these tools enable the prediction of complexes up to 32,000 tokens on 64 NVIDIA B300 GPUs, making large-scale virtual screening and ribosome-scale modeling computationally feasible.
How Trigger.dev is using ClickHouse to scale observability for long-running AI workflows
Trigger.dev, an open-source platform for serverless asynchronous tasks, needed to scale observability for increasingly complex, long-running AI workflows spanning thousands of tenants. Its initial Postgres design stored logs, traces, and events in a growing table, making indexes, analytics, and operational reliability increasingly difficult to manage. The team moved observability workloads to ClickHouse after evaluating performance, scalability, open-source compatibility, deployment flexibility, and support for dynamic telemetry, including its native JSON data type. Migration occurred gradually at the task-execution level, routing each run’s logs to either database without downtime or customer intervention. ClickHouse now supports real-time telemetry analysis, approximately 200-millisecond P95 latency for queries returning tens of thousands of rows, and a dramatically smaller telemetry storage footprint.
amazon.science
Capturing token IDs during agentic interactions for better reinforcement learning
Reinforcement learning for agentic tasks requires updating model parameters against the precise token sequences generated during rollouts. Standard agent harnesses frequently modify conversation transcripts through message compaction and tool formatting, causing retokenization drift that degrades policy-gradient training. Turnstile addresses this issue as a Rust-based proxy situated between agent harnesses and inference backends such as SGLang. By intercepting OpenAI-compatible Chat Completions traffic, the proxy records exact token IDs, log probabilities, loss masks, weight versions, and mixture-of-experts routing traces at the moment of generation. Validation across text-based coding and multimodal computer-use agents demonstrated steady reinforcement learning improvements without requiring modifications to agent harnesses.
Create a LangChain Deep Agents Harness Profile for NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Ultra to Improve Performance
The tutorial shows how to create and validate a LangChain Deep Agents harness profile for NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Ultra using an evaluation benchmark rather than fine-tuning the model. It starts with a baseline, analyzes failed trajectories, and iterates on prompts, exclusions, or added middleware while rerunning tests to detect regressions. One failure occurred when read_file returned the first page of a large file without signaling that more content existed, so the model answered before paginating to the line containing opal-fox-91. The proposed ReadFileContinuationNoticeMiddleware appends a continuation notice when a full page is returned, raising the reported benchmark score from 94/127 to 96/127 and resolving all three read_file tests. The source also describes automating this propose, verify, and retain-or-reject loop, with safeguards against overfitting and regressions.
Running Low-Latency Analytical Workloads with GPU-Accelerated Presto on NVIDIA GB200 NVL72
GPU-accelerated Presto integrates NVIDIA cuDF algorithms and NVLink to deliver low-latency analytical query execution on massive datasets. Benchmarks derived from TPC-H across scale factors 1K and 3K reveal that a single NVIDIA DGX B200 system with eight GPUs outperforms 8- to 10-node Intel Xeon clusters by up to 8.2x. Scaling out across multinode NVIDIA GB200 NVL72 systems paired with IBM Storage Scale achieved additional performance gains. Enabling NVIDIA GPUDirect Storage, tuning I/O parameters, adjusting thread counts, and applying query rebatching delivered a cumulative 64% reduction in query runtimes. Topology-aware GPUDirect Storage cold reads proved roughly twice as fast as standard POSIX reads by avoiding CPU memory staging and NUMA boundary crossing penalties.
Open, convenient and predictable: Introducing Provisioned Throughput
Companies adopting open-weight models for production workloads have faced a trade-off between convenient but best-effort serverless inference and powerful but complex dedicated GPU instances. Together AI’s Provisioned Throughput fills that gap with reserved inference capacity sold as Provisioned Throughput Units (PTUs). Each PTU is priced at $0.05 per minute and guarantees a fixed rate of tokens per minute for a specific model, with a 99% uptime SLA. Input, cached input, and output tokens draw down capacity at different rates, letting teams optimize for their traffic shape. Available now for MiniMax M3 and GLM-5.2 with capacity in North America and EMEA and a one-month minimum term, at full utilization costs can run roughly $0.36 per million input tokens and $2.16 per million output tokens, up to 90% below proprietary alternatives.
Contextual Policies in Omnigent: Using session state to better govern AI agents
Omnigent, an open-source meta-harness for AI agents, introduces contextual policies to make agent controls safer and less disruptive than per-action allow, deny, or approval rules. Policies receive session events, maintain private state such as tools used, documents read, accumulated risk, initial intent, and model spend, then allow, deny, transform, or escalate the next action. Omnigent’s server intercepts tool calls from supported agents and applies these policies consistently, while examples include Google Drive restrictions based on documents created or marked confidential, risk thresholds that require approval for later email or file-sharing actions, and budget thresholds that pause or redirect work to a cheaper model. Intent-based authorization limits tools according to the user’s opening request, applying least privilege across supported harnesses and custom agents. The project is described as open source and alpha, with the server providing one interception layer for agents using different harnesses.
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