Ariana Strandburg-Peshkin

Ines Nolasco, Burooj Ghani, Shubhr Singh et al.

Few-shot bioacoustic event detection consists in detecting sound events of specified types, in varying soundscapes, while having access to only a few examples of the class of interest. This task ran as part of the DCASE challenge for the third time this year with an evaluation set expanded to include new animal species, and a new rule: ensemble models were no longer allowed. The 2023 few shot task received submissions from 6 different teams with F-scores reaching as high as 63% on the evaluation set. Here we describe the task, focusing on describing the elements that differed from previous years. We also take a look back at past editions to describe how the task has evolved. Not only have the F-score results steadily improved (40% to 60% to 63%), but the type of systems proposed have also become more complex. Sound event detection systems are no longer simple variations of the baselines provided: multiple few-shot learning methodologies are still strong contenders for the task.

Julian C. Schäfer-Zimmermann, Vlad Demartsev, Baptiste Averly et al.

Bioacoustic research, vital for understanding animal behavior, conservation, and ecology, faces a monumental challenge: analyzing vast datasets where animal vocalizations are rare. While deep learning techniques are becoming standard, adapting them to bioacoustics remains difficult. We address this with animal2vec, an interpretable large transformer model, and a self-supervised training scheme tailored for sparse and unbalanced bioacoustic data. It learns from unlabeled audio and then refines its understanding with labeled data. Furthermore, we introduce and publicly release MeerKAT: Meerkat Kalahari Audio Transcripts, a dataset of meerkat (Suricata suricatta) vocalizations with millisecond-resolution annotations, the largest labeled dataset on non-human terrestrial mammals currently available. Our model outperforms existing methods on MeerKAT and the publicly available NIPS4Bplus birdsong dataset. Moreover, animal2vec performs well even with limited labeled data (few-shot learning). animal2vec and MeerKAT provide a new reference point for bioacoustic research, enabling scientists to analyze large amounts of data even with scarce ground truth information.

Chainarong Amornbunchornvej, Ivan Brugere, Ariana Strandburg-Peshkin et al.

Behavior initiation is a form of leadership and is an important aspect of social organization that affects the processes of group formation, dynamics, and decision-making in human societies and other social animal species. In this work, we formalize the "Coordination Initiator Inference Problem" and propose a simple yet powerful framework for extracting periods of coordinated activity and determining individuals who initiated this coordination, based solely on the activity of individuals within a group during those periods. The proposed approach, given arbitrary individual time series, automatically (1) identifies times of coordinated group activity, (2) determines the identities of initiators of those activities, and (3) classifies the likely mechanism by which the group coordination occurred, all of which are novel computational tasks. We demonstrate our framework on both simulated and real-world data: trajectories tracking of animals as well as stock market data. Our method is competitive with existing global leadership inference methods but provides the first approaches for local leadership and coordination mechanism classification. Our results are consistent with ground-truthed biological data and the framework finds many known events in financial data which are not otherwise reflected in the aggregate NASDAQ index. Our method is easily generalizable to any coordinated time-series data from interacting entities.