Skills Catalog

Research Copilot ships with 14 builtin skills — lazy-loaded Markdown modules that give the agent domain expertise. Skills auto-activate when the coordinator detects a matching intent or when you invoke them by name.

For how skills work and how to write your own, see Getting Started → Add custom skills.

Publication-ready ML/AI/Systems conference papers (NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, ACL, AAAI, COLM, OSDI, NSDI, ASPLOS, SOSP). Venue-specific templates, LaTeX, citations.

"Draft a NeurIPS-style introduction for , with related work citations."

Strategically revise an existing CS/AI/Systems draft for resubmission. Framing diagnosis, claim crystallization, reviewer defense, venue-aware polish.

"Help me revise this paper based on the reviewer comments in REVIEWS.md."

Competitive proposals for NSF, NIH, DOE, DARPA, and Taiwan NSTC. Agency-specific formatting, review criteria, broader impacts.

"Draft NSF specific aims for a project on ."

Rewrite AI-sounding drafts to feel natural while preserving facts, numbers, and citations. Flow and cadence, not content.

"Humanize this paragraph — reduce AI tone, keep the meaning."

ScholarEval framework: structured quality assessment across problem formulation, methodology, analysis, and writing with quantitative scoring.

"Evaluate this paper draft using ScholarEval and give me a score breakdown."

IMRAD manuscripts in full paragraphs (never bullets). Two-stage: outline → flowing prose. Citations (APA/AMA/Vancouver), CONSORT/STROBE/PRISMA.

"Write the Methods section for a journal manuscript on ."

Low-level plotting for full customization — novel plot types, integration with specific workflows, PNG/PDF/SVG export.

"Plot a custom dashboard with matplotlib showing over time."

Statistical visualization with pandas integration — distributions, relationships, categorical comparisons with attractive defaults.

"Make a pair plot and correlation heatmap for this dataset."

Meta-skill for journal-ready multi-panel figures. Orchestrates matplotlib/seaborn with Nature/Science/Cell styling, significance annotations, colorblind-safe palettes.

"Create a 4-panel figure for Nature Methods with significance bars."

Publication-quality diagrams via OpenRouter (Gemini 3 Pro Image + review). Iterative refinement, only regenerates below quality threshold. Requires OPENROUTER_API_KEY.

"Generate a system architecture diagram for ."

Polished research presentation slides in Markdown via Marp — conference talks, lab meetings, thesis defense, posters.

"Turn this paper draft into a 12-slide conference talk."

Structured ideation frameworks for high-impact research directions. Use when exploring new topics, pivoting focus, or hitting diminishing returns.

"Brainstorm five research directions at the intersection of and ."

Eight cognitive-science frameworks for breakthrough ideas. Use when stuck in a local optimum and brainstorming-research-ideas alone yields only incremental candidates.

"I'm stuck — reframe this problem using analogical reasoning and two other cognitive lenses."

Systematic coding workflow: test-first, 300-line generation limits, edit-over-rewrite, error-feedback loops, incremental verification.

"Implement this function and add tests; fix iteratively until the suite passes."

Drop a Markdown file at <workspace>/.pi/skills/<name>/SKILL.md or ~/.research-pilot/skills/<name>/SKILL.md — see Getting Started for the frontmatter format. Project-local skills override user-global, which override builtins.