Huggingface

huggingface

The robotics-specific Hub layer for robium — this skill deliberately does not teach Hub mechanics itself. HuggingFace ships and maintains its own skill catalog (huggingface/skills on GitHub, 25 skills as of this session — counted directly from the repo's README skills table, fetched directly this session) covering auth, download/upload, repo management, Jobs, and every other Hub operation in depth and kept current with the live hf CLI. Re-teaching any of that here would drift out of sync with the upstream catalog almost immediately — so the first thing this skill does, every time, is make sure that catalog is actually installed, then get out of the way. What's left for this skill to own is narrow: which datasets and models matter for robium's two verticals (manipulation, navigation), and the Hub-side conventions robotics data follows there.

When to use this skill

• Any Hub operation inside a robotics project where the HuggingFace skills aren't installed yet — install them first (see Key directives), then use them directly rather than working around this skill.
• Deciding which dataset or model on the Hub fits a manipulation or navigation task, or understanding the Hub-side conventions (LeRobot tag, dataset card fields) a robotics dataset follows.
• The trigger phrases in the description: HF hub operations inside a robotics project, 'huggingface dataset for robots', 'upload the policy to the hub'.
• Cross-references — go to the sibling skill instead when the question is:
  • Any actual Hub mechanic — auth, hf download/hf upload, repo creation, Jobs, Spaces deployment — → the installed HuggingFace skills (hf-cli and whichever others hf skills add pulls in). This skill only gets you there; it does not re-teach the commands.
  • The LeRobotDataset format itself (directory layout, recording, training/eval CLI) → lerobot. This skill only covers the Hub-side conventions a LeRobot dataset follows once it's there, not the format's internals.
  • Whether to source data from the Hub at all vs. sim-generation or teleop → the data umbrella skill. This skill assumes "use the Hub" is already the answer and covers what to look for once there.
  • The whole-stack decision this feeds into → architect (routes here).

Key directives

• Delegation posture: delegate. This is robium's delegation showcase — install HuggingFace's own skill catalog before doing any Hub mechanic, and defer to it completely rather than approximating a command from memory. This skill's own content is limited to the robotics-specific layer on top (Usage patterns below); it is not a substitute for the upstream skills.

• Install the upstream catalog before any Hub operation, if not already present:

  /plugin marketplace add huggingface/skills
  /plugin install hf-cli@huggingface-skills
  

  hf-cli is the recommended bootstrap skill — it's generated from the locally installed hf CLI, so it stays current across CLI releases rather than going stale the way a hand-written command list would. Confirmed via direct fetch of the huggingface/skills repo's README and its .claude-plugin/marketplace.json this session — the marketplace manifest's name field is huggingface-skills, which is the identifier the @huggingface-skills suffix above resolves against once the marketplace is registered (the README's own prose examples elsewhere in that repo show @huggingface/skills, the GitHub path, instead — the manifest's name field is the one that actually resolves, and this session's own environment, which already has that marketplace's skills installed, shows them namespaced huggingface-skills:<skill> rather than huggingface/skills:<skill>, corroborating it; re-verify against the live manifest before relying on either form in a script).

• Pull in additional upstream skills on demand, not all at once. Once hf-cli is installed, hf skills add <skill-name> installs any other skill from the same catalog (e.g. a Spaces or dataset-viewer skill) — confirmed via direct fetch of the upstream README this session. Install only what a given task needs rather than the whole catalog up front.

• Never re-teach Hub auth, transfer, or Jobs mechanics in this skill. If a task needs hf auth login, hf download, hf upload, or a Jobs invocation, that command comes from the installed upstream skill, not from this one — even a single-line example here would drift out of sync with the CLI faster than the upstream generated skill does.

• Never write dataset/model facts (episode counts, licensing, which datasets exist under a tag) from memory. Hub content changes constantly — confirm a specific dataset or model's current state against its Hub page or the searches below before planning a project around it, the same standard data holds sourcing decisions to.

Quick start

1. Check whether the upstream HuggingFace skills are already installed for this project/session — if hf-cli (or another huggingface-skills:* skill) is already available, skip straight to step 3.

2. If not installed, run the two commands in Key directives to register the marketplace and install hf-cli.

3. Use the installed skill directly for the actual Hub operation (auth, download, upload, search) — this skill's job ends here for mechanics.

4. For the robotics-specific question ("which dataset/model fits this task", "what does a LeRobot dataset's Hub listing look like") — see Usage patterns below.

Usage patterns

Finding a manipulation dataset or model. Search the Hub's LeRobot tag (huggingface.co/datasets?other=LeRobot — confirmed via direct fetch this session to be a live, populated filter) for datasets already in the LeRobotDataset format; Open X-Embodiment datasets converted to that format are collected under the lerobot/open-x-embodiment collection specifically (confirmed via direct fetch of that collection page this session — roughly 60 contributed datasets from multiple institutions, in LeRobot format). Pretrained manipulation policies (ACT, Diffusion, Pi0-family, SmolVLA and others) are hosted the same way, under repo IDs like lerobot/diffusion_pusht — the exact policy families and hub-hosted checkpoints are lerobot's territory to enumerate (see that skill's Quick start); this skill's job is pointing at the tag/collection, not re-listing every checkpoint.

Finding a navigation dataset. Navigation has no single equivalent of the LeRobot tag — search the Hub's general robotics/SLAM-tagged datasets instead, and check embodiment/sensor fit before committing, per data's embodiment-match directive. Don't assume a manipulation-oriented search pattern (the LeRobot tag, a single owning collection) transfers directly.

Reading a robotics dataset's Hub-side shape before pulling it. A LeRobotDataset repo on the Hub carries its info.json/dataset-card metadata (robot type, fps, camera/state/action feature shapes) alongside the Parquet+MP4 data files — inspect that metadata (via the installed huggingface-datasets/hf-cli skill, or the Hub's own dataset viewer) before assuming a dataset's action space matches the target robot; lerobot owns the format's internals once you're inside it.

Uploading a trained policy or dataset. Once a policy or dataset exists locally, the actual push is a Hub mechanic — use the installed hf-cli skill's upload command. This skill's only addition on top is: tag it so it's discoverable the way the datasets above were found (the LeRobot tag for a LeRobotDataset-format push, a clear model card for a policy checkpoint).

Platform gotchas

• The upstream skill catalog is a separate plugin install, not bundled with robium. A fresh environment needs the two commands in Key directives run once before any Hub mechanic works through skills at all — don't assume hf-cli is present just because this skill is.
• Auth is entirely the upstream skill's territory. Whether Hub access needs a token, which scopes it needs, and how it's configured locally are all hf-cli's concerns — this skill has no auth guidance of its own to fall back on if that skill isn't installed.

Customization

• Different embodiment or task: re-run the LeRobot-tag/Open X-Embodiment search (manipulation) or the general robotics/SLAM search (navigation) for the new target, and re-check embodiment fit — a dataset found for one robot/task pairing is not assumed to transfer, per data's embodiment-match directive.
• Private or org-scoped datasets/models: access and visibility are Hub auth mechanics — handled entirely by the installed upstream skills, not by anything in this one.

References

• Upstream: huggingface/skills GitHub repo (install story, skill catalog, and marketplace manifest — fetched directly this session, including its .claude-plugin/marketplace.json), Hub dataset filter: LeRobot tag (fetched directly this session), Open X-Embodiment (LeRobot format) collection (fetched directly this session), Hugging Face Hub dataset docs (upload/format conventions, fetched directly this session). Sibling skills: lerobot (LeRobotDataset format, training/eval, and the policies hosted under the lerobot Hub org), data (sourcing strategy — decides whether the Hub is the right source before this skill's search patterns apply), architect (routes here).

Changelog