Cdf Auto Labeling
NVIDIAOfficialCreated by NVIDIA
- Skill
- Workflow
- Automation and integrations
- Apache-2.0
- Medium risk
AutoGineer summary
Written by AutoGineer from the skill’s own files, not by the author
CDF Auto-Labeling is a central routing skill designed to guide users through the lifecycle of automated data labeling tasks within the Cosmos Data Factory ecosystem. It provides a structured approach to onboarding, scenario planning, cookbook authoring, and pipeline execution. By acting as a router, it directs users to specialized documentation for specific tasks—such as migrating pipelines, debugging workflows, or managing containerized stages—while enforcing strict input validation and operational guardrails to ensure reproducible results.
What it does
- Routes users to specific documentation based on their current task or stage in the pipeline.
- Validates critical run inputs like data paths, output directories, and model endpoints.
- Provides a standardized workflow for running, debugging, and customizing annotation cookbooks.
- Facilitates the integration of new stages and the management of prebuilt container images.
- Enforces operational guardrails to prevent common errors like hardcoding secrets or skipping validation steps.
When to use it
- When you are a new user needing to get started with CDF Auto-Labeling.
- When you need to plan a new annotation scenario or adapt an existing cookbook.
- When you are troubleshooting a failed pipeline run or debugging a specific stage.
- When you need to migrate an external annotation repository into the CDF framework.
- When you need to pull or configure prebuilt stage containers from NGC.
Advantages
- Ensures consistent and reproducible pipeline execution through standardized cookbooks.
- Prevents configuration errors by mandating input validation before execution.
- Simplifies complex workflows by breaking them down into manageable, modular tasks.
- Promotes best practices by delegating specialized tasks to dedicated reference guides.
Usage examples
- “I cloned the repo and have my own warehouse-safety video. How do I produce auto-labels for my domain?”
- The agent will guide you to verify your environment, run a shipped example to confirm the stack, plan your scenario, adapt a cookbook, and execute a dry-run.
- “How do I pull the prebuilt stage containers from NGC?”
- The agent will direct you to the ngc-containers reference and provide instructions on using make pull to retrieve the necessary images.
Install
Download the skill as a ZIP:
https://autogineer.com/agent-skills/nvidia/cdf-auto-labeling/downloadUnzip it into the cross-client skills folder of your project:
mkdir -p .agents/skills && unzip cdf-auto-labeling.zip -d .agents/skills
Documentation by NVIDIA
CDF Auto-Labeling
Use this skill when a user wants to kick off CDF Auto-Labeling on their own data, domain, or use case, or when the request matches a shipped cookbook, stage, authoring, or migration task. This is a router: sequence the specialized references instead of duplicating their detail.
Routing (Read First)
| Request looks like | Read |
|---|---|
| New user, clean checkout, first validated run, "how do I get started" | This file, then the matching reference below |
| Choose annotation targets / stage subset for a domain | references/scenario-planning.md |
| Create, review, or adapt a cookbook | references/cookbook-authoring.md |
| Write or adapt VLM/LLM prompts or question banks | references/prompt-authoring.md |
| Migrate an existing annotation repo into this one | references/pipeline-migration.md |
| Run the video data augmentation cookbook | references/video-data-augmentation.md |
| Run or choose an EPAS / PAS cookbook | references/event-and-person-attribute-search.md |
| Run event-verification reasoning | references/event-verification-reasoning.md |
| Debug an already-integrated workflow | references/workflow-runner-debugging.md |
Pull prebuilt stage images from NGC, log in to nvcr.io, or fix a missing cdf-* image | references/ngc-containers.md |
| Implement or review a new stage or Dockerized service | references/workflow-stage-integration.md |
| Configure or debug one production stage | The matching file under references/stages/ |
Stage references: super-resolution, detection-and-tracking, captioning, visual-qa, reasoning, person-attribute-search, grounding-2d, referring-expressions, training-export.
Instructions
Confirm the critical run inputs with the user before doing anything else, and ask a concise question whenever one is missing or ambiguous - never guess or silently invent a default. At minimum confirm: input data path, output path, VLM/LLM endpoint URLs and model names, model cache path, GPU ids, and (for reasoning-capable models) the
max_tokenscap. Restate the confirmed values back to the user before the first execution.Verify the environment: repository cloned,
maketargets available, the model cache path exists, the VLM/LLM endpoints are reachable, and a GPU is available. State any missing prerequisite as a blocker instead of assuming it. If the stage images are not present locally, offer to pull the prebuilt images from NGC withmake pullinstead of building them. Use ngc-containers.Run a shipped example first to confirm the stack works end to end before customizing. Pick the closest operator pipeline - video data augmentation, event-and-person-attribute-search, or event-verification-reasoning - and run its committed cookbook. Use the matching operator reference.
Plan the target scenario: define modality, domain, intended consumer, and required annotations, and get a minimal stage subset. Use scenario-planning.
Adapt the closest shipped cookbook to the new domain rather than authoring from scratch. Use cookbook-authoring.
Author the domain prompts and question banks. Use prompt-authoring.
Configure the per-stage settings for the domain (detector classes or SAM3 prompts, endpoints, windowing,
max_tokens). Use the relevant stage reference, starting with detection-and-tracking.Dry-run the adapted cookbook, then execute and validate the outputs. Use workflow-runner-debugging.
Adopting an existing external annotation or dataset-generation repository into CDF instead of starting from a shipped cookbook is a migration task; use pipeline-migration for that path.
Examples
New user, new domain: "I cloned the repo and have my own warehouse-safety video. How do I produce auto-labels for my domain?"
Guided path:
Confirm env (model cache, VLM/LLM endpoints, GPU), then prove the stack on a shipped example before customizing:
make run SCRIPT=workflow-runner:main \
ARGS='--cookbook-file cookbooks/video_data_augmentation/configs/pipeline_video.yaml --container-dry-run'Plan the domain (scenario-planning) -> subset
detection_and_tracking -> captioning -> visual_qa -> reasoning -> training_export(addgrounding_2dfor caption→boxes orreferring_expressionsfor boxes→phrases; use grounding-2d / referring-expressions).Copy the closest cookbook to
cookbooks/warehouse_safety/configs/pipeline.yamland adapt inputs, detector classes/SAM3 prompts, prompts, and question banks.Dry-run the new cookbook, then run for real and validate outputs:
make run SCRIPT=workflow-runner:main \
ARGS='--cookbook-file cookbooks/warehouse_safety/configs/pipeline.yaml --container-dry-run'Guardrails
Do not guess or fabricate the critical inputs enumerated in step 1; if any is missing or ambiguous, ask the user and confirm before executing.
Do not customize a cookbook before a shipped example runs clean; a broken base makes domain debugging ambiguous.
Keep the first custom pipeline minimal - only the stages needed for the requested annotations - and expand later.
Verify that every selected stage's service package and image exist in the current branch before promising an end-to-end run.
Do not put secrets, tokens, or absolute home paths in committed cookbooks; use placeholders such as
<model-cache>and env vars for endpoint keys.For reasoning-capable models (for example Gemini 3 Flash), raise
max_tokenson thevisual_qaandreasoningLLM substages to avoid the thinking-token tax; keep the default cap for non-reasoning models.Do not rely on non-CDF pipelines, commands, or file locations. A first run must be reproducible through
workflow-runner:maininside this repo.
Files
- ATTRIBUTION.mdAdded by AutoGineer909 B
- BENCHMARK.md7.3 KiB
- LICENSELicence file added by AutoGineer11.2 KiB
- SKILL.md7.5 KiB
- evals/evals.json5.2 KiB
- references/README.md1.3 KiB
- references/cookbook-authoring.md6.3 KiB
- references/cookbook-authoring/cookbook-schema.md6.3 KiB
- references/cookbook-authoring/scenario-authoring.md2.8 KiB
- references/event-and-person-attribute-search.md5.1 KiB
- references/event-and-person-attribute-search/run-reference.md2.4 KiB
- references/event-verification-reasoning.md1.9 KiB
- references/event-verification-reasoning/run-reference.md1.3 KiB
- references/ngc-containers.md4.2 KiB
- references/pipeline-migration.md7.2 KiB
- references/pipeline-migration/migration-playbook.md3.8 KiB
- references/pipeline-migration/nonlinear-video-pipeline-example.md2.7 KiB
- references/pipeline-migration/service-reuse-matrix.md3.4 KiB
- references/pipeline-migration/sidecar-contracts.md3.0 KiB
- references/prompt-authoring.md3.3 KiB
- references/prompt-authoring/domain-evidence-checklists.md2.2 KiB
- references/prompt-authoring/prompt-patterns.md3.9 KiB
- references/prompt-authoring/question-bank-authoring.md2.0 KiB
- references/scenario-planning.md3.6 KiB
- references/scenario-planning/annotation-recommendations.md5.0 KiB
- references/scenario-planning/intake-and-decisions.md2.6 KiB
- references/scenario-planning/pipeline-composition.md6.0 KiB
- references/stages/captioning.md3.6 KiB
- references/stages/detection-and-tracking.md6.2 KiB
- references/stages/detection-tracking-patterns.md10.3 KiB
- references/stages/grounding-2d-patterns.md1.6 KiB
- references/stages/grounding-2d.md5.1 KiB
- references/stages/guardrails.md532 B
- references/stages/person-attribute-search.md4.5 KiB
- references/stages/reasoning.md5.0 KiB
- references/stages/referring-expressions-patterns.md1.2 KiB
- references/stages/referring-expressions.md5.5 KiB
- references/stages/super-resolution.md4.4 KiB
- references/stages/training-export.md3.7 KiB
- references/stages/visual-qa.md6.2 KiB
- references/video-data-augmentation.md12.2 KiB
- references/video-data-augmentation/run-reference.md3.7 KiB
- references/workflow-runner-debugging.md6.0 KiB
- references/workflow-runner-debugging/data-handoff.md3.5 KiB
- references/workflow-runner-debugging/runner-debugging-patterns.md3.7 KiB
- references/workflow-stage-integration.md7.1 KiB
- references/workflow-stage-integration/stage-service-contract.md3.0 KiB
- references/workflow-stage-integration/validation-checklist.md2.1 KiB
- skill-card.md4.9 KiB
- skill.oms.sig15.6 KiB
evals/evals.json
[
{
"id": "1",
"question": "I just cloned the repo and have my own warehouse-safety videos. I'm new to this - how do I get started producing auto-labels for my domain?",
"expected_skill": "cdf-auto-labeling",
"ground_truth": "Response uses the auto-labeling skill to give a guided end-to-end path: first confirm the critical inputs with the user (input data path, output path, VLM/LLM endpoints and model names, model cache, GPU ids) and ask for anything missing; verify the environment; run a shipped example cookbook with --container-dry-run to prove the stack before customizing; then plan the scenario (scenario-planning), adapt the closest shipped cookbook (cookbook-authoring), author prompts/question banks (prompt-authoring), configure stages starting with detection-and-tracking, and dry-run then execute and validate (workflow-runner-debugging). It routes to the matching references instead of duplicating their detail and does not claim it executed anything.",
"expected_behavior": [
"Response triggers the auto-labeling skill for a new user/new domain onboarding request.",
"Response confirms critical inputs and asks the user for any that are missing or ambiguous before running.",
"Response tells the user to run a shipped example first (dry-run) before customizing.",
"Response sequences plan -> adapt cookbook -> author prompts -> configure stages -> dry-run/execute/validate and routes to the specialized skills.",
"Response provides a container dry-run command and does not claim execution."
]
},
{
"id": "2",
"question": "Kick off the auto-labeling pipeline for my new use case and just run it.",
"expected_skill": "cdf-auto-labeling",
"ground_truth": "Response uses the auto-labeling skill and refuses to guess. Because the input data path, output path, and VLM/LLM endpoints/model names are not provided, it asks the user to supply and confirm those critical inputs (plus model cache, GPU ids, and reasoning max_tokens if a reasoning model is used) before executing. It restates the confirmed values, requires a dry-run before any real run, and does not invent paths, endpoints, or credentials.",
"expected_behavior": [
"Response triggers the auto-labeling skill.",
"Response asks the user for the missing critical inputs (data path, output path, endpoints/model names) rather than guessing or inventing defaults.",
"Response states it will restate/confirm inputs and dry-run before any real run.",
"Response does not fabricate paths, endpoint URLs, model IDs, or credentials."
]
},
{
"id": "3",
"question": "What's the fastest way to confirm the stack works end to end before I customize anything for my own domain?",
"expected_skill": "cdf-auto-labeling",
"ground_truth": "Response uses the auto-labeling skill to recommend running a shipped example pipeline (the closest operator cookbook - video data augmentation, event-and-person-attribute-search, or event-verification-reasoning) via workflow-runner with --container-dry-run first, then a real run, before adapting anything for the custom domain. It confirms environment prerequisites (model cache, reachable endpoints, GPU) and notes that customizing before a clean example run makes domain debugging ambiguous.",
"expected_behavior": [
"Response triggers the auto-labeling skill.",
"Response recommends running a shipped example cookbook first (dry-run then real run) to validate the stack.",
"Response confirms environment prerequisites before running.",
"Response advises against customizing a cookbook before the shipped example runs clean."
]
},
{
"id": "4",
"question": "I don't want to build all the stage containers myself. Where do I get the Auto-Labeling images, and do I need to log in to nvcr.io?",
"expected_skill": "cdf-auto-labeling",
"ground_truth": "Response uses the auto-labeling skill and routes to the ngc-containers reference. It explains that the stage images are public in the NGC Catalog under nvcr.io/nvidia/cdf-* with the 1.1.0 release tag, that anonymous pulls work so docker login nvcr.io is optional, and that an authenticated login uses the literal username $oauthtoken with an NGC personal API key passed through --password-stdin from an environment variable. It recommends dry-running the cookbook to find the images the run needs, then running make pull with NGC_IMAGES limited to those images so each image is tagged with the local cdf-* name the workflow runner expects, and verifying with docker image ls and another dry run.",
"expected_behavior": [
"Response triggers the auto-labeling skill and uses the ngc-containers reference.",
"Response points to nvcr.io/nvidia/cdf-* images and the NGC Catalog pages.",
"Response states that login is optional because the images allow anonymous pulls.",
"Response shows docker login nvcr.io with username $oauthtoken and --password-stdin, reading the key from an environment variable.",
"Response recommends make pull (optionally with NGC_IMAGES) so images get the local names the workflow runner uses.",
"Response never asks the user to paste an API key into chat or commit it to a file."
]
}
]
Requirements and compatibility
Works with: Claude Code, Claude apps, OpenAI Codex, GitHub Copilot, Cursor, Gemini CLI, Kiro, OpenCode, Goose, Amp, Roo Code, JetBrains Junie, Factory Droid, Devin (ex-Windsurf), Mistral Vibe, OpenHands, Letta
“Works with” means the tool reads the open Agent Skills format; a skill written for one tool may use features others lack.
Security
What our scanner noticed· Medium risk
- Large base64-encoded blobs
A static scan is not a guarantee. Skills are third-party content: review a skill before you let an agent use it.
Attribution and licence
- Created by
- NVIDIA
- Publisher
- NVIDIA (Official)
- Source
- NVIDIA/skills · skills/cdf-auto-labeling · commit fce3cca
- Licence
- Apache License 2.0 (redistribution allowed)
- LICENSE (added by AutoGineer from LICENSE-APACHE)
- ATTRIBUTION.md (written by AutoGineer)
- Synced
AutoGineer is not affiliated with or endorsed by NVIDIA or NVIDIA.
Download ZIP
The ZIP holds the skill’s files, its licence files and an ATTRIBUTION.md. Download cdf-auto-labeling.zip