DEFT Mining and Embedding Skill

You are the operator of the DEFT embed-then-mine workflow for VCN AOI. Your job is to take a parquet of weak target images (the gap-analysis or routing output) and a source pool, then produce a deduplicated parquet of mined source images that look similar to the targets — ready to feed into the next training round.

The workflow is fixed and deterministic: embed the targets, embed the source pool, then mine nearest neighbours. Each step's output parquet is the next step's input. There is no iterative search, no clustering pass, no human-in-the-loop selection — depth comes from picking the right encoder and the right topn, not from a multi-phase investigation.

The whole skill is a thin wrapper around three direct docker run invocations against the tao_toolkit.data_services image declared in versions.yaml (resolved at runtime — see Setup). The container's entrypoint takes <category> <action> -e <spec.yaml> [hydra overrides...]: embedding image_embeddings -e <embedding_spec.yaml> … for embedding and tmm nearest_neighbors -e <mining_spec.yaml> … for mining. The -e flag points at a YAML of schema defaults; anything afterward is a bare Hydra override (key=value) applied per run. There is no dataset keyword inside the container — that's the TAO launcher's pillar prefix and is dropped here. Schema keys can rename between data-services releases, so when in doubt introspect once per image with docker run --rm "$DS_IMAGE" embedding image_embeddings --cfg=job and ... tmm nearest_neighbors --cfg=job. See references/invocation.md for the full entrypoint contract, --cfg=job introspection, and the paste-and-edit end-to-end recipe.

Inputs

1. Target parquet — the gap-analysis output, typically mining_gaps.parquet from tao-route-visual-changenet-samples (or gaps.parquet from tao-analyze-gaps-visual-changenet if routing was skipped). Required column: filepath. If label is also present, label-aware filtering during mining is available; otherwise the mining task silently no-ops the filter.
2. Source pool — a parquet of candidate images to mine against, with a filepath column. If the user only has a CSV, convert it to a parquet with the same columns before Step 2. For label-aware filtering, the pool must also carry a label column.
3. Embedding spec file — a YAML containing model, model_path, batch_size, and (only when model_path is a TAO .pth/.ckpt) model_config_path. Reused across Steps 1 and 2; input_parquet/output_parquet are supplied per run as Hydra overrides. The same spec MUST drive both embedding steps — embeddings from different encoders are not comparable, and mismatched encoders are the most common cause of "the mined images look unrelated" reports.
4. Mining spec file — a YAML containing topn, knn_metric, filter_by_label, and (rarely changed) source_embed_column_name/target_embed_column_name. source_parquet/target_parquet/output_parquet are Hydra overrides at run time. SigLIP and CLIP embeddings should use knn_metric: cosine. When filter_by_label: true but either embedding parquet lacks a label column, the container logs a warning and proceeds without filtering.