arXiv AI

Representing short-term movement to reveal animal identity and learning progress

arXiv AI
Oct 16

Learning Intrinsic Dynamics in Latent World Models

The paper investigates how encouraging action predictability in latent world models can preserve intrinsic dynamics, which are crucial for planning. By deriving a theoretical lower bound and conducting empirical tests, the authors show that action predictability prevents the encoder from merging distinct action outcomes, even when visual appearance varies. Using a method called Concat IDM, they achieve a substantial increase in planning success on the Push‑T benchmark, from 9.1% to 77.2%, demonstrating the practical benefit of this inductive bias.

By Jiamin Shi, Yuanhong Zhang, Zhiyang Liu, Jiawei Sun, Jingwen Fu
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 8

MorphCL: Morphological Contrastive Learning for Inertial-based Human Activity Recognition

MorphCL introduces a self‑supervised pretraining framework for inertial‑based human activity recognition that explicitly models global motion structure through morphology‑aware grouping. By leveraging motion primitives and domain‑specific descriptors, MorphCL improves linear probing and fine‑tuning performance of encoders by up to 15 percentage points in F1‑score. Compared with existing foundation models, MorphCL‑pretrained encoders achieve comparable or better linear probing results while using 4,600× less data, and the learned embeddings exhibit clear, morphologically meaningful clusters that better separate kinematically similar activities.

By Marius Bock, Yuwei Zhang, Juergen Gall, Michael Moeller, Kristof Van Laerhoven, Cecilia Mascolo
arXiv AI
Sep 10

RevalExo: A Functional Daily-Activity Benchmark for Inertial and Visual Locomotion Mode Recognition in Older Adults and Clinical Cohorts

RevalExo is a new benchmark for locomotion mode recognition that focuses on functional daily activities performed by older adults and clinical cohorts. It includes 27 participants from three groups—healthy older adults, stroke survivors, and older adults with probable sarcopenia—recorded with lower-body IMUs and, for a subset, synchronized egocentric video. The dataset offers 10.1 hours of frame‑level annotations across 11 locomotion modes, and the authors evaluate unimodal, multimodal, cross‑population, and cross‑modal recognition challenges, finding that sensor fusion improves performance but transitions and generalization remain difficult.

By Diwas Lamsal, Juha Carlon, Reinhard Claeys, Maxim Yudayev, Louis Flynn, Tom Verstraten, David Beckw\'ee, Eva Swinnen, Mihai B\^ace, Bart Vanrumste, Benjamin Filtjens
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 23

Agent-Centric Animal Pose Forecasting

arXiv:2607. 19548v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Understanding animal behavior at an algorithmic level -- what animals attend to, how they form internal models and plans, and how this maps to action -- remains a central challenge in neuroscience and ethology.

By Eyrun Eyjolfsdottir, Kristin Branson
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 30

Sparse-View Interpretable 3D Animal Behavior Representations for Neural Encoding and Decoding

arXiv:2609.36217v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A deeper understanding of brain function requires a precise, structured characterization of behavior.Yet, extracting behavioral representations from vi...

By Xinming Dai, Qihang Jin, Tianshu Tan, Baiyuan Chen, Hanrui Lyu, Lenny Aharon, Kyle Daruwalla, Xun Helen Hou, Matthew R. Whiteway, Liam Paninski, Yizi Zhang
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 21

BrainWideBench: Benchmarking large-scale pretraining and across-animal transfer in multi-region neural recordings

BrainWideBench is a benchmark that evaluates across‑animal transfer on multi‑region neural recordings from 139 mice, covering 276 brain regions. It comprises three task suites—behavior decoding, neural activity prediction, and anatomical organization recovery—to test whether learned representations support diverse downstream objectives. The benchmark shows that while pretraining improves performance over single‑session baselines, current methods vary in transfer ability and none perform uniformly well across all suites, highlighting the challenge of developing general‑purpose neural representations.

By Alexandre Andre, Shivashriganesh P. Mahato, Vinam Arora, Keshav Balaji, Divyansha Lachi, Nanda H. Krishna, Jingyun Xiao, Yizi Zhang, Ximeng Mao, Wenrui Ma, Han Yu, International Brain Laboratory, Daniel Birman, Niccol\`o Bonacchi, Gaelle A. Chapuis, Joana A. Catarino, Felicia Davatolhagh, Mayo Faulkner, Laura Freitas-Silva, Fei Hu, Julia M. Huntenburg, Anup Khanal, In\^es Laranjeira, Petrina Lau, Guido T. Meijer, Nathaniel J. Miska, Jean-Paul Noel, Alejandro Pan-Vazquez, Georg Raiser, Cyrille Rossant, Karolina Z. Socha, Anne E. Urai, Miles J. Wells, Steven J. West, Olivier Winter, Blake Richards, Guillaume Lajoie, Cole Hurwitz, Mehdi Azabou, Matthew R. Whiteway, Liam Paninski, Eva L. Dyer