DFRMBL · SPEC 01 · REV A

Expert judgment for physical AI

Robots can fold. We tell them when they got it wrong.

Clothes, towels, bedding, packaging, food — for soft things there’s no rule for “done right.” Deformable turns the judgment of people who’ve handled these materials for years into task standards, expert labels and a judge model that catches the mistake while it happens.

Flat 01 · T-shirt · front Review
  1. 1grasp here ✕
  2. 2should grasp ✓
  3. 3collar off-center

✕ GRASP_OFFSET_FROM_SEAM · ~5 cm → collar off-center

VERDICT: REWORK · grasp at equal distance from both side seams

Key figuresSpec 01

0 / 21
causes of failure a frontier AI model named in our blind test
17
failure types in our folding taxonomy
10+ yrs
of production expertise behind every label
5
material categories: garments, towels, bedding, packaging, food

01 / Problem

More data doesn’t fix a bad fold. Judgment does.

Robots learn physical tasks from thousands of recorded attempts. Someone has to decide which attempts were done right and why the rest failed. For a box, that’s easy — it’s in the bin or it isn’t. For a towel, a duvet or a T-shirt, there’s no formula. Teams check the last frame by eye, or use AI judges that are close to guessing on anything involving contact. And the mistakes that matter happen a minute before they show.

Flat 01 · T-shirt · frontDefect
  1. 1grasp ~5 cm off the side seam ✕
  2. 2grasp on the seam ✓
  3. 3collar off-center at the end

02 / Product

Three layers of judgment. One loop.

Deformable Standards

A written standard for each task: how it should be done step by step, what counts as a defect, how to score the result. Every operator, labeler and model judges the same way.

Deformable Labels

Expert labels on robot video: the moment it went wrong, the cause in material terms, the fix, marked on the frame. Ready for filtering demos, training reward models and fine-tuning.

Deformable Judge Early access

A vision-language model trained on expert labels. It watches a robot work, flags the mistake, explains why and shows where to grasp instead — so a human doesn’t have to babysit the robot.

03 / Services

From your first failed rollout to a judge in your training loop.

  1. 01

    Failure review Start here · Free

    Send 20 failed rollouts. Within about a week, get a report: the moment each attempt went wrong, the cause, the fix, marked on the frame — and the 3–5 reasons your robot keeps failing.

  2. 02

    Expert labeling

    Production experts label your robot data at volume: every defect and correct action, why it happened, what to do instead. Structured JSON aligned to your episodes and timestamps.

  3. 03

    Task standards & taxonomy

    A written standard and failure taxonomy for your tasks, built with production experts. Brief operators, align labelers, score models.

  4. 04

    Policy evaluation

    Before you ship a new policy, run its rollouts past expert judgment. Success rate by failure type, not just pass/fail.

  5. 05

    Judge API Early access

    Deformable Judge on your rollouts: per-episode verdict, failure type, cause and fix — as a score for filtering data or a reward for RL.

  6. 06

    Expert data collection On request

    Demonstrations recorded by production experts on real factory floors in Central Asia, with full material specs labs never capture.

Pricing per project. Start with a free failure review.

04 / Sample review

Same fold. Two judges.

Flat 01 · T-shirt · frontTechnologist

Technologist

0:16
Holds the collar, not the shoulder-sleeve seam junction → diagonal first fold.
0:36
Grasp ~5 cm off the side seam → edge folds under.
1:20
Grasp ~10 cm off the side seam → asymmetric fold.
1:42
Collar off-center — caused by 0:36 and 1:20.
Verdict
Rework. Fix: grasp at equal distance from both side seams.

Based on a real episode from an open robot-folding dataset and a blind test of a frontier AI model.

05 / Research

We publish what generic judges miss.

Blind testOct 2026

Blind test: frontier AI vs. a garment technologist

Two “high-quality” episodes from an open robot-folding dataset. The technologist found 21 defects and named every cause in garment terms. A frontier AI model named none, missed that the collar slid because of grasps a minute earlier, and called both folds acceptable.

MeasureTechnologistFrontier AI model
Causes named in garment terms210
Linked the off-center collar to earlier graspsYesNo
VerdictReject both“Acceptable”
Robot arms lifting a T-shirt from a real folding episode; the grasp is about 5 cm off the side seam. DEFECT · GRASP_OFFSET_FROM_SEAM
Source: Hugging Face lerobot/high_quality_folding

Send 20 failed rollouts. Get the reasons back.

vlad@dfrmbl.com