Iain D. Couzin

Mohammad Salahshour, Sumanth Bhargava, Kajal Kumari et al. · allen-ai, eth-zurich

Collective information acquisition requires groups to combine personal evidence with social information while remaining coupled to the external state. Communication noise can affect this process, but the role of noise remains unclear. In an online experiment, 600 participants worked in four-person human groups estimating a room temperature across 25 rounds while receiving either faithful social information, comprehension noise in which each receiver saw independently perturbed social information, or production noise in which perturbations were stored before display and could be seen by multiple receivers. The thermometer cue was objectively veridical, but its reliability was subjectively uncertain and the unitless 50--250 room-temperature range created a task-induced conflict between displayed evidence and everyday temperature expectations. Production-noise groups spent more rounds tightly clustered around a wrong value than comprehension-noise groups (\(p=0.016\), group-level permutation). Production noise more often created a wrong common signal (\(p=0.025\), Fisher's exact test) and made that signal persist across more rounds (\(p=0.004\), permutation). Dynamic update models showed that production noise was not more harmful because people followed peers more strongly, but because the same peer influence acted on more correlated production-noise perturbations. Exploratory human analyses linked the mechanism to psychological patterns while a GPT-agent experiment clarified a boundary condition: GPT agents registered uncertainty through reduced confidence without reproducing human-scale production-noise vulnerability. Overall, noise did not simply degrade collective information acquisition. Comprehension noise could sometimes improve correction relative to the faithful control, whereas production noise could turn perturbations into common evidence and stabilize consensus on error.

Hemal Naik, Alex Hoi Hang Chan, Junran Yang et al.

Recent advances in machine learning and computer vision are revolutionizing the field of animal behavior by enabling researchers to track the poses and locations of freely moving animals without any marker attachment. However, large datasets of annotated images of animals for markerless pose tracking, especially high-resolution images taken from multiple angles with accurate 3D annotations, are still scant. Here, we propose a method that uses a motion capture (mo-cap) system to obtain a large amount of annotated data on animal movement and posture (2D and 3D) in a semi-automatic manner. Our method is novel in that it extracts the 3D positions of morphological keypoints (e.g eyes, beak, tail) in reference to the positions of markers attached to the animals. Using this method, we obtained, and offer here, a new dataset - 3D-POP with approximately 300k annotated frames (4 million instances) in the form of videos having groups of one to ten freely moving birds from 4 different camera views in a 3.6m x 4.2m area. 3D-POP is the first dataset of flocking birds with accurate keypoint annotations in 2D and 3D along with bounding box and individual identities and will facilitate the development of solutions for problems of 2D to 3D markerless pose, trajectory tracking, and identification in birds.

Urs Waldmann, Alex Hoi Hang Chan, Hemal Naik et al.

Markerless methods for animal posture tracking have been rapidly developing recently, but frameworks and benchmarks for tracking large animal groups in 3D are still lacking. To overcome this gap in the literature, we present 3D-MuPPET, a framework to estimate and track 3D poses of up to 10 pigeons at interactive speed using multiple camera views. We train a pose estimator to infer 2D keypoints and bounding boxes of multiple pigeons, then triangulate the keypoints to 3D. For identity matching of individuals in all views, we first dynamically match 2D detections to global identities in the first frame, then use a 2D tracker to maintain IDs across views in subsequent frames. We achieve comparable accuracy to a state of the art 3D pose estimator in terms of median error and Percentage of Correct Keypoints. Additionally, we benchmark the inference speed of 3D-MuPPET, with up to 9.45 fps in 2D and 1.89 fps in 3D, and perform quantitative tracking evaluation, which yields encouraging results. Finally, we showcase two novel applications for 3D-MuPPET. First, we train a model with data of single pigeons and achieve comparable results in 2D and 3D posture estimation for up to 5 pigeons. Second, we show that 3D-MuPPET also works in outdoors without additional annotations from natural environments. Both use cases simplify the domain shift to new species and environments, largely reducing annotation effort needed for 3D posture tracking. To the best of our knowledge we are the first to present a framework for 2D/3D animal posture and trajectory tracking that works in both indoor and outdoor environments for up to 10 individuals. We hope that the framework can open up new opportunities in studying animal collective behaviour and encourages further developments in 3D multi-animal posture tracking.

Alex Hoi Hang Chan, Otto Brookes, Urs Waldmann et al.

Computer vision methods have demonstrated considerable potential to streamline ecological and biological workflows, with a growing number of datasets and models becoming available to the research community. However, these resources focus predominantly on evaluation using machine learning metrics, with relatively little emphasis on how their application impacts downstream analysis. We argue that models should be evaluated using application-specific metrics that directly represent model performance in the context of its final use case. To support this argument, we present two disparate case studies: (1) estimating chimpanzee abundance and density with camera trap distance sampling when using a video-based behaviour classifier and (2) estimating head rotation in pigeons using a 3D posture estimator. We show that even models with strong machine learning performance (e.g., 87% mAP) can yield data that leads to discrepancies in abundance estimates compared to expert-derived data. Similarly, the highest-performing models for posture estimation do not produce the most accurate inferences of gaze direction in pigeons. Motivated by these findings, we call for researchers to integrate application-specific metrics in ecological/biological datasets, allowing for models to be benchmarked in the context of their downstream application and to facilitate better integration of models into application workflows.

Devis Tuia, Benjamin Kellenberger, Sara Beery et al.

Data acquisition in animal ecology is rapidly accelerating due to inexpensive and accessible sensors such as smartphones, drones, satellites, audio recorders and bio-logging devices. These new technologies and the data they generate hold great potential for large-scale environmental monitoring and understanding, but are limited by current data processing approaches which are inefficient in how they ingest, digest, and distill data into relevant information. We argue that machine learning, and especially deep learning approaches, can meet this analytic challenge to enhance our understanding, monitoring capacity, and conservation of wildlife species. Incorporating machine learning into ecological workflows could improve inputs for population and behavior models and eventually lead to integrated hybrid modeling tools, with ecological models acting as constraints for machine learning models and the latter providing data-supported insights. In essence, by combining new machine learning approaches with ecological domain knowledge, animal ecologists can capitalize on the abundance of data generated by modern sensor technologies in order to reliably estimate population abundances, study animal behavior and mitigate human/wildlife conflicts. To succeed, this approach will require close collaboration and cross-disciplinary education between the computer science and animal ecology communities in order to ensure the quality of machine learning approaches and train a new generation of data scientists in ecology and conservation.