SKILL.md

metadata

name: detection-bootstrap
description: >-
  Bootstrap an object-detection dataset and a small trained detector from images
  that have NO labels — zero-shot label with Falcon-Perception, validate,
  convert, then fine-tune a compact Apache-licensed model, all on Hugging Face
  Jobs. Runs fully autonomously or with human review checkpoints. Use when you
  have an image collection and want a detector but no annotations exist.

Bootstrap a detector from unlabeled images

The loop: zero-shot teacher labels → validate → convert → train a small student → evaluate → publish. Every step is a self-contained UV script from uv-scripts/object-detection on the Hugging Face Hub, or a hf jobs command. --help works on every script.

Pick your path

Five decisions cover most runs; each routes into the numbered steps below.

1. Where are the images? Dataset repo → falcon-perception.py. Bucket → falcon-perception-bucket.py (reads .jpg/.jpeg/.png only — convert JPEG 2000 / TIFF first).
2. Transport to the trainer: build canonical train.parquet / validation.parquet with embed-bucket-images.py (images embedded, gold excluded and asserted). Trainers that take HF datasets read the parquet directly — including straight off a bucket; trainers that want a COCO directory tree get one generated in-job with materialize-coco.py — onto a bucket mount if more than one job will train on it (a complete tree is reused, not rebuilt). Never hand-assemble or upload directory trees: a tree generated from the parquet cannot have missing-image mismatches. Run smoke-test.py first (free, local, ~30 s): it proves these plumbing scripts still produce correct output before a paid job depends on them.
3. Boxes or masks? Boxes → the D-FINE default in step 5. Masks → an RF-DETR-Seg-style trainer via materialize-coco.py (RLE masks carried through and resized from the teacher's inference frame to the image frame).
4. Human available? Show step-1 previews and do the step-6 gold slice. Headless → numeric proxies and say unreviewed.
5. After the first student: run the step-6 loop — student over the teacher-empty pages at a low threshold, VLM pre-triage, retrain on the corrections.

Check if a human in the loop

You can use the approach outlined in this skill with or without a human in the loop.

• With a human in the loop (better models): show them the step-1 previews — "is the teacher boxing the right things?" is the highest-value question, and its fix is the cheapest (a better query and a re-run of the teacher). Then train on a small slice first (500–1k images) and show 20 rendered predictions before spending on the full corpus. If corrections are worth collecting at volume, run a review pass with review-detections.py (keyboard accept/reject in the browser — quick mode for whole-image verdicts in random order with quotable rates, boxes mode for per-box rejects; pushes a review column), fold corrections in and retrain. Diff the corrected set against the first pass (diff-hf-datasets.py) to measure how good the zero-shot pass actually was.
• Autonomously (headless): don't pause for review — use the numeric proxies, and say unreviewed in the final report and model card.

1. Sense-check the class name before spending GPU money (free)

Falcon-Perception queries are class names, not instructions ("photograph" works; "the photographs, excluding captions" returns nothing), and one class per run (combined queries collapse — run per class and merge on image_id). Model details: hf models card tiiuae/Falcon-Perception.

Check cheaply on 3 images before any full pass. The teacher (Falcon-Perception) is a 0.6B model, 1.3 GB download — it runs on a CUDA GPU (fast), Apple Silicon (MLX backend auto-selected, about 6 s/image), or plain CPU (slow, but fine for 3 images). Run the check wherever is practical for you:

# locally, if your machine can:
uv run https://huggingface.co/datasets/uv-scripts/object-detection/raw/main/falcon-perception.py \
  --dataset <USER>/<IMAGES> --limit 3 --query photograph --preview

# or the same check as a small job (previews don't persist on Jobs — push a tiny dataset instead).
# l4x1 is the cheapest flavor that fits the engine (see step 2's flavor rule):
hf jobs uv run --flavor l4x1 --secrets HF_TOKEN \
  https://huggingface.co/datasets/uv-scripts/object-detection/raw/main/falcon-perception.py \
  --dataset <USER>/<IMAGES> --limit 3 --query photograph --out <USER>/<NAME>-check --private

Judge the result before scaling up:

• If you can view images, look at the rendered previews (or the pushed check dataset) — are the right things boxed? render-detections.py renders any dataset in this schema and pixel-verifies its own output (a page with instances whose render equals the source exits nonzero — silent blank-overlay bugs are real and have been shown to humans as "done").

• If you can't, compare instance counts across candidate queries (stats-hf-dataset.py below works on a pushed check dataset): near-zero instances/image means the class name is wrong for this material — try a synonym (photograph / illustration / figure / cartoon). Suspiciously many (more than about 10/image) can mean the query is matching layout blocks — but dense plates genuinely carry 10–20 figures, so counts are a fallback signal only; previews are the judge.

• Measured on real material, previews judged:

  material	worked	partial	dud
  historic newspaper pages (b/w scans)	photograph, illustration
  book / encyclopaedia plates	illustration (incl. dense multi-figure plates)	caption (good on true plates, grabs whole text columns on text-heavy pages)	figure (0 hits on the same pages)

• No vision at all? A vision-capable subagent can judge the previews if you can spawn one; otherwise tell the user the check ran unviewed.

(Falcon-Perception has a custom architecture, so it can't be served as an OpenAI-compatible endpoint — iterate via the batch script. If you swap in a teacher that vLLM can serve, a temporary hot server on Jobs is the faster way to iterate on queries: see Serve Models on Jobs.)

2. Teacher pass on Jobs

hf jobs uv run --flavor a10g-large --secrets HF_TOKEN --timeout 2h \
  https://huggingface.co/datasets/uv-scripts/object-detection/raw/main/falcon-perception.py \
  --dataset <USER>/<IMAGES> --query photograph --out <USER>/<NAME>-photograph --private

• Sizing: expect a few images per second, not tens — the pass is decode-bound, so a bigger GPU changes little; to go faster, shard the file list across several jobs writing to the same output bucket. --limit on either script caps a run.

• Flavor rule (all three failures measured): the engine needs a 24 GB-VRAM GPU (16 GB T4s CUDA-OOM during prefill) and more than 15 GB host RAM (the engine sizes itself from the GPU and ignores host RAM, so t4-small and a10g-small are OOMKilled before the first image). hf jobs hardware --json lists every flavor's ram, accelerator and price — l4x1 is the cheapest fit (fine for the step-1 check); a10g-large is faster for a corpus pass.

• One job per class (step 1's rule). Every run labels its boxes category 0 in a single-name ClassLabel, so a naive concat collapses the classes — renumber each run to its index in a combined ClassLabel when merging. Rows align on image_id (every run contains every image):

  from datasets import ClassLabel, Sequence, load_dataset
  
  names = ["illustration", "map"]
  parts = [load_dataset(f"<USER>/<NAME>-{n}", split="train") for n in names]
  extra = [dict(zip(ds["image_id"], ds["objects"])) for ds in parts[1:]]
  
  def merge(row):
      o = {k: list(v) for k, v in row["objects"].items()}
      for i, run in enumerate(extra, start=1):
          r = run[row["image_id"]]
          o["bbox"] += r["bbox"]; o["area"] += r["area"]
          o["rectangularity"] += r["rectangularity"]
          o["category"] += [i] * len(r["bbox"])
      return {"objects": o, "n_instances": len(o["bbox"])}
  
  feats = parts[0].features.copy()
  feats["objects"]["category"] = Sequence(ClassLabel(names=names))
  merged = parts[0].map(merge, features=feats)
  

  (masks_rle concatenates the same way if you need the masks.)

• Output schema: objects.bbox in YOLO format (normalized center x, y, w, h), objects.category (a ClassLabel named after the query), objects.area, objects.rectangularity, plus image, image_id, width, height.

• There are no confidence scores (the model has none). rectangularity (mask area ÷ box area) is the triage proxy: values near 0 are usually junk, 0.785 is a circle, 1.0 a full rectangle.

• Submit with --detach (returns the job id immediately), then block on completion with hf jobs wait <id> [<id> ...] --timeout 2h — it exits 0 only if every job succeeded, so it chains cleanly into the next step. hf jobs logs <id> / hf jobs inspect <id> for progress and errors.

• A job can sit in SCHEDULING while the flavor queue drains — that is a queue, not a failure. Don't resubmit: a second copy racing to the same --out just doubles the bill. If you do switch (hf jobs hardware for alternatives), cancel the queued copy first (hf jobs cancel <id>).

• For images in a storage bucket instead of a dataset, use falcon-perception-bucket.py — it writes resumable parquet parts back to a bucket (kill and re-run the same command; done keys are skipped). It reads .jpg / .jpeg / .png only — convert JPEG 2000 or TIFF scans first, or it will silently find zero images:

  hf jobs uv run --flavor a10g-large --secrets HF_TOKEN --timeout 2h --detach \
    https://huggingface.co/datasets/uv-scripts/object-detection/raw/main/falcon-perception-bucket.py \
    --src <namespace>/<bucket> --prefix <path/under/bucket> \
    --out <namespace>/<out-bucket> --query illustration
  

  Publish once at the end so the parts feed the rest of this loop (parquet stores category as bare ints; the cast attaches the class name):

  from datasets import ClassLabel, Image, Sequence, load_dataset
  ds = load_dataset("parquet", data_files="hf://buckets/<namespace>/<out-bucket>/part-*.parquet",
                    split="train")
  feats = ds.features.copy()
  feats["objects"]["category"] = Sequence(ClassLabel(names=[ds[0]["query"]]))
  if "image" in feats:  # parts written with --embed-images: make the bytes a decodable Image column
      feats["image"] = Image()
  ds.cast(feats).push_to_hub("<namespace>/<dataset>")
  

  The bucket path's output is annotations-only by default — there is no image column, and the step-5 trainer and review-detections.py both need embedded images. embed-bucket-images.py (same repo) joins the bytes back in, drops the teacher's error rows, excludes and asserts the gold slice, splits train/validation, and writes the final schema exactly once — to a dataset repo, or as train.parquet/validation.parquet in a bucket. (--embed-images on the teacher pass writes the bytes into the parts instead — storage is cheap, and the join step then skips its re-fetch; the cost is a copy of the corpus in the output bucket.) Trainers that want a COCO directory tree get one generated from that parquet by materialize-coco.py — once, onto a bucket mount if several jobs will train on it — never hand-assemble or upload directory trees.

3. Validate the labels (free, local)

uv run https://huggingface.co/datasets/uv-scripts/object-detection/raw/main/validate-hf-dataset.py \
  <USER>/<NAME>-photograph --bbox-format yolo
uv run https://huggingface.co/datasets/uv-scripts/object-detection/raw/main/stats-hf-dataset.py \
  <USER>/<NAME>-photograph --bbox-format yolo

Expect VALID with 0 out-of-bounds and 0 zero-area boxes. W001 warnings on empty images are normal and worth keeping as training signal — but treat them as unverified negatives: zero-shot teachers miss real instances on a meaningful fraction of "empty" pages (a third, on one measured corpus). The step-6 loop is how you find and flip them. Drop obvious junk before training: degenerate slivers (extreme aspect ratio + tiny area) and near-duplicate boxes (IoU > 0.9 within one image).

4. Convert YOLO → COCO for training (free, local)

Trainers expect COCO xywh pixels; the teacher emits YOLO normalized. One command:

uv run https://huggingface.co/datasets/uv-scripts/object-detection/raw/main/convert-hf-dataset.py \
  <USER>/<NAME>-photograph <USER>/<NAME>-coco --from yolo --to coco_xywh

5. Train a small detector

A known-good default: fine-tune ustc-community/dfine-small-coco (D-FINE small, 10.4M params, Apache-2.0, in transformers) on the step-4 COCO dataset — 800 images, 30 epochs, t4-medium, about 48 minutes (hf jobs hardware shows current prices). Training needs only a T4: step 2's 24 GB-VRAM rule is the teacher's engine, not the student's.

The huggingface-vision-trainer skill runs the training end to end (dataset validation, augmentation, mAP eval, Hub persistence) — install it with hf skills add huggingface-vision-trainer if you don't have it, and follow its object-detection path with the <USER>/<NAME>-coco dataset and the settings above. Hold out the validation split — and the step-6 gold slice — BEFORE training, and never train on either. Write checkpoints continuously to the synced /data mount, not /tmp or a local output dir: Jobs can be SIGTERM'd at any time (node reclaim, requeue), anything outside the mount dies with the job, and durable checkpoints are also what make stopping at a plateau safe.

Other trainers work — the dataset is plain COCO. RT-DETRv2 is a comparable compact Apache-2.0 pick; RF-DETR (Apache-2.0, DINOv2 backbone) is a good starter, and its Seg variant can learn from the teacher's masks_rle masks. Check the license fits the use — hf models card <id> shows it; flag restrictive licenses (e.g. ultralytics/YOLO is AGPL) to the user rather than deciding for them. Explore further: transformers object-detection models · ultralytics-library models.

Decode masks_rle like this — each RLE lives in its own frame, which never matches the recorded width/height:

import json, numpy as np
from PIL import Image
from pycocotools import mask as mask_utils

for rle in json.loads(row["masks_rle"]):
    seg = mask_utils.decode({**rle, "counts": rle["counts"].encode()})  # frame = rle["size"]
    if seg.shape != (row["height"], row["width"]):
        seg = np.asarray(Image.fromarray(seg).resize((row["width"], row["height"]), Image.NEAREST))

6. Evaluate honestly

• Report mAP on the held-out slice. Be clear about what it measures: agreement with the teacher, not accuracy against human truth — no human labels exist in this loop unless you make some (next bullet).
• Gold slice (with a human in the loop): hold out about 100 random images BEFORE training — keyed on a stable image id that is identical in every dataset you build (path prefixes from different runs silently break the match) — and assert the exclusion before submitting any training job: train count = total − gold, overlap = 0. Then have the human verify every box on them with review-detections.py --mode boxes --order random, then correct any misses (the tool flags them with M; drawing the missing boxes is manual for now). Then report TWO numbers: mAP vs teacher labels AND mAP vs the human gold. They differ, and the gap is the finding — in the validation run of this skill: 0.84 vs teacher labels but 0.44 vs human gold, both mAP@50 on held-out pages. That gap is the teacher's systematic divergence from human annotators, which teacher-agreement alone cannot see.
• The student can at best match its teacher (measured on a comparable loop: student 97.4% vs teacher 95.0% human-acceptable on the same sample). The point of distilling is throughput and cost (10–100× cheaper per image than the teacher), not accuracy gains.
• Evaluate with the model card's decode contract, and write that contract INTO the card (input padding, score handling — with one class use the raw logit/sigmoid, never softmax). This is load-bearing: a standard decode against a padded-square model measured 0.03 mAP where the documented decode measured 10× higher. (Evaluating locally on Apple Silicon: pass the trainer's eval a CPU device — the COCO eval path uses float64, which MPS lacks.)
• Spot-check 20 or so predictions visually before calling it done — or, if running without a human and you cannot view images, state prominently in the report that the model is unreviewed.
• It can make sense to run this process in a loop: predict → review (a human, or a vision-capable agent, via review-detections.py) → retrain on the corrections → review again, until the acceptance rate stops improving. Two things make the loop cheap: point the student at the teacher-empty pages at a low threshold first (that is where the teacher's false negatives concentrate, and flipping them from negative to positive is the biggest training-signal win), and pre-triage candidates with a VLM judge (one crop per instance, mask highlighted) so the human only reviews the uncertain residue rather than every candidate.

7. Publish with honest provenance

Push the model and dataset — ask the user whether public or private; if you can't ask, default to private and say so. Build each dataset's final schema in memory and push once — never stage an intermediate push to the repo you will publish. A second push with different columns leaves the repo's stored features stale and load_dataset fails with a cast error; if the schema must change, push to a new repo id. The cards must state: labels are zero-shot weak labels from Falcon-Perception (name the script + date), which filters ran, and that recall is unmeasured unless you measured it against an independent source. Say what the model is for and what it was trained on. A model trained this way is a first pass. The review loop above is how it gets better.