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Toolbox

Explore popular pretrained & foundation models, useful scripts/libraries, and datasets that you can leverage for your next ML project. Learn about their features, how to use them effectively, and see examples of them in action.

Fine-tuning with LoRA: Colab, CHTC, or AWS
Notebooks
Code-along
Carpentries
Fine-tuning
Deep learning
Computer vision
OCR
LLM
GPU
Compute
Hugging Face
PyTorch
Transfer learning
AWS
Cloud
Quantization

Fine-tune a vision-language model to read historical handwriting using LoRA. Run the exercise on Google Colab, UW-Madison’s CHTC, or AWS SageMaker.

Chris Endemann
2026-11-02

Qwen: Open-Weight Language and Multimodal Models from Alibaba Cloud
Models
Deep learning
NLP
LLM
GenAI
Foundation models
Multimodal learning
Transformer
Hugging Face
Trustworthy AI
Quantization
Benchmarks
RAG
GPU

An overview of the Qwen model family: what it includes, why a 27B model can keep up with frontier models, how to pick a size for your GPU, where it runs at UW-Madison, and…

Zain Waseem, Chris Endemann
2026-09-18

National Research Platform (NRP)
Compute
Guides
Notebooks
Code-along
GPU
LLM
Jupyter
Education
GenAI

Free open-weight LLM endpoints plus free Kubernetes GPU compute for InCommon-affiliated researchers. Reference + Python code-along for hitting the NRP-hosted LLM API.

Chris Endemann
2026-05-13

Understanding Quantization and Precision
Notebooks
Code-along
Compute
Deep learning
LLM
Quantization
GPU
Hugging Face
PyTorch
Fine-tuning

Explore quantization and floating-point precision in deep learning — covering FP32, FP16, BF16, INT8, and 4-bit formats and their impact on GPU memory and inference speed.

Chris Endemann
2026-03-09

Intro to GCP for ML/AI
Workshops
Code-along
Carpentries
Compute
Cloud
Google
GCP
GPU
LLM
RAG
Retrieval
This Intro to GCP workshop teaches core workflows for building, training, and tuning ML/AI models in Google Cloud’s Vertex AI platform. Participants learn to set up data…
Chris Endemann
2026-03-05

UW-Madison Cloud Services (AWS, GCP, Azure)
Compute
Guides
Cloud
UW-Madison
AWS
GCP
Azure
GPU
GenAI
Fine-tuning
UW-Madison offers enterprise cloud computing through contracts with Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and Microsoft Azure. These services are managed…
Chris Endemann
2026-03-02

SWE-bench: Evaluating AI on GitHub Issues
Benchmarks
Agentic coding
LLM
GenAI
SWE-bench is a benchmark designed to evaluate whether AI models can resolve issues from working open-source codebases. Rather than testing code generation in isolation…
Chris Endemann
2026-02-27

OpenScholar: Scientific Literature Synthesis with Retrieval-Augmented LMs
GenAI
Guides
NLP
LLM
RAG
Retrieval
Foundation models
Hugging Face
OpenScholar is an open-source, retrieval-augmented language model (LM) designed to help researchers navigate and synthesize scientific literature. Developed by the Allen…
Chris Endemann
2026-02-27

Intro to AWS for ML/AI
Workshops
Code-along
Carpentries
Compute
AWS
GPU
Cloud
RAG
Bedrock
Fine-tuning
Machine Learning on AWS with SageMaker and Bedrock teaches researchers how to run ML and AI work on AWS: where to store the data, which compute to use, how to launch and…
Chris Endemann
2025-11-07

Google Colab
Compute
Guides
Jupyter
Google
GPU
Cloud
Google Colab is a cloud-based Jupyter notebook environment that runs entirely in the browser. It allows you to write and execute Python code without installing anything…
Chris Endemann
2025-09-26

BadgerCompute
Compute
Guides
UW-Madison
GPU
Jupyter
BadgerCompute is UW–Madison’s browser-based interactive computing service built on JupyterHub. It provides on-demand access to CPUs, memory, and GPUs without requiring any…
Chris Endemann
2025-09-24

BioTrove: Biodiversity Image Dataset
Data
Image data
Computer vision
Biology
Ecology
Biodiversity
Deep learning
CLIP
Hugging Face
Citizen science

A curated dataset of 161M+ images across 324K species for biodiversity AI, built from iNaturalist research-grade observations.

Chris Endemann
2025-09-11

TorchAudio
Libraries
Audio data
PyTorch
Deep learning
Signal processing
Music
The TorchAudio library is an audio library that allows you to incorporate modern audio signal processing into deep learning workflows. Developed by the PyTorch team, it…
Andrew Piela
2025-08-26

MegaDetector: Pre-Trained Animal Object Detection for Camera Trap Images
Models
Computer vision
Camera trap
Ecology
Object detection
Image data
MegaDetector is an AI model that identifies animals, people, and vehicles in camera trap images (which also makes it useful for eliminating blank images). This model is…
Ryan Bemowski
2025-08-20

MLflow 101: Local Experiment Tracking for Beginners
Libraries
Guides
Reproducibility
Sklearn
MLOps
Code-along
This is a beginner-friendly overview of local experiment tracking with MLflow. If you’ve ever lost a “good” result because you forgot which settings you used, MLflow solves…
Parith Reddy
2025-08-14

Pytesseract: OCR with Tesseract (LSTM) in Python
Libraries
OCR
NLP
Computer vision
Text analysis
Multilingual
Deep learning
LSTM
Image data
Pytesseract is a Python wrapper for Google’s Tesseract Optical Character Recognition (OCR) engine, used for recognizing and extracting text from images. It works on a wide…
Chris Endemann
2025-04-05

DeepForest: A Toolkit of Models for Tree and Wildlife Detection in Aerial Imagery
Models
Model exploration
Object detection
Remote sensing
Ecology
Geospatial data
Computer vision
Deep learning
CNN
Transfer learning
Hugging Face
DeepForest is an open-source Python library for object detection in aerial RGB imagery, designed for ecological applications such as identifying tree crowns (the visible…
Chris Endemann
2025-04-04

iNaturalist (iNat)
Data
Image data
Biology
Ecology
Computer vision
Multimodal learning
Citizen science
CLIP
Zero-shot learning

A massive citizen-science biodiversity dataset with millions of species photos, rich spatial/temporal metadata, and fine-grained labels for computer vision research.

Chris Endemann
2025-04-03

INQUIRE: Ecological Image Retrieval Benchmark
Data
Computer vision
Retrieval
Zero-shot learning
Benchmarks
Multimodal learning
ViT
LLM
Biology
Ecology
Image data
Hugging Face
Biodiversity
Citizen science

A benchmark for evaluating text-to-image retrieval on expert-level ecological queries, built from iNaturalist data with domain-specific relevance judgments.

Chris Endemann
2025-03-26

CIFAR Dataset
Data
Image data
Computer vision
Image classification
CNN
Deep learning

A classic image classification benchmark of 60,000 32x32 color images across 10 classes, widely used for evaluating computer vision models.

Aidan O’Brien
2025-03-03

UW Generative AI Services & Policies
GenAI
Guides
Microsoft Copilot
Gemini
UW-Madison
LLM
Foundation models
Cloud
The University of Wisconsin–‍Madison is committed to responsibly harnessing the power of generative artificial intelligence to enhance teaching, learning, research and…
Chris Endemann
2025-01-07

NotebookLM: A GenAI Summarization Tool
GenAI
Guides
NLP
Gemini
LLM
Foundation models
NotebookLM is a generative AI tool designed to assist with understanding dense, complex texts, including research papers in machine learning and AI. Developed by Google Labs…
Chris Endemann
2024-12-09

AI Fairness 360 (AIF360)
Libraries
AIF360
Fairness
Trustworthy AI
Bias
Sklearn
Tabular
Computer vision
NLP
Text analysis
AI Fairness 360 (AIF360) is a scikit-learn-compatible open-source Python library designed to detect and mitigate bias in machine learning models. Its compatibility with…
Chris Endemann
2024-12-03

PyTorch-OOD
Libraries
PyTorch-OOD
OOD detection
PyTorch
Trustworthy AI
Deep learning
Computer vision
NLP
Tabular
PyTorch-OOD is an open-source Python library designed for out-of-distribution (OOD) detection and related tasks like anomaly detection, novelty detection, and open-set…
Chris Endemann
2024-12-03

Kornia
Libraries
Model exploration
Computer vision
Deep learning
PyTorch
Image segmentation
ViT
Object detection
Image data
Kornia is a differentiable library that allows classical computer vision to be integrated into deep learning models. Developed by E. Riba, D. Mishkin, D. Ponsa, E. Rublee…
Radi Akbar
2024-10-29

Leaf Vein Dataset (LVD2021)
Data
Image data
Biology
Image segmentation
Computer vision
Agriculture

High-resolution leaf images with pixel-wise vein annotations across 36 leaf types, designed for segmentation and plant phenotyping research.

Lei Li, Wenzheng Hu, Jiang Lu, Changshui Zhang
2024-10-18

XGBoost: Tree-Based Gradient Boosting for Tabular Data
Models
Boosting
Decision trees
Tabular
Classification
Regression
XGBoost, or eXtreme Gradient Boosting, is a machine learning algorithm built upon the foundation of decision trees, extending their power through boosting. Originally…
Chris Endemann
2024-10-17

Project Gutenberg: Text & Audio Books
Data
Audio data
NLP
Text analysis
Multimodal learning

A large open collection of free eBooks and audiobooks useful for NLP tasks like language modeling, text classification, and speech synthesis.

Chris Endemann
2024-10-14

U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation
Models
Deep learning
Medical imaging
Image segmentation
CNN
Computer vision
U-Net is a convolutional neural network architecture designed for biomedical image segmentation. Introduced in 2015 by Ronneberger and colleagues in the paper, “U-Net…
Chris Endemann
2024-09-16

MONAI: Medical Open Network for AI
Libraries
Deep learning
PyTorch
Medical imaging
Model exploration
Image segmentation
Computer vision
MONAI (Medical Open Network for AI) is an open-source, community-supported framework for deep learning in healthcare imaging. Built on top of PyTorch, it provides…
Alan McMillan
2024-08-14

Hugging Face
Libraries
Hugging Face
NLP
Deep learning
Foundation models
LLM
Computer vision
Model exploration
Model sharing
PyTorch
Tensorflow
Multimodal learning
Fine-tuning
Hugging Face is an open-source platform and ecosystem for machine learning. It’s best known for the Transformers library, but it has grown into a one-stop shop for finding…
Chris Endemann
2024-08-01

Center for High Throughput Computing (CHTC)
Compute
Guides
UW-Madison
GPU
HPC
HTC
Fine-tuning
Established in 2006, the Center for High Throughput Computing (CHTC) is UW-Madison’s core computational service provider for large-scale computing. CHTC offers two main…
Chris Endemann
2024-06-25
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