[LUM#22] Animal Intelligence
The mechanisms of animal perception remain a mystery, and studying them sometimes comes at the expense of the subjects’ well-being. What if artificial intelligence allowed us to model this perception in order to study it in silico? This is the hypothesis put forward by Julien Renoult, a researcher at the Center for Functional and Evolutionary Ecology1, is testing with mandrills as part of the Wildcom AI.
Favoring family members—or, as they say, “pulling strings”—is not unique to humans. Nepotism is a practice observed in many animal species, including mandrills, primates that live in matriarchal societies centered around mothers. “We observe a stronger bond among paternal half-sisters in mandrills than among those who share the same mother,” explains Julien Renoult, a researcher at CEFE. This observation is surprising because in this species, males wander between groups, engaging in clandestine mating. How, then, can mandrills have such a precise understanding of their paternal kinship? (Mandrill mothers associate with infants who look like their own offspring using phenotype matching, in eLife science, November 2022).
In the Skin of a Monkey
The hypothesis that kinship recognition is based on facial resemblance seems the most obvious, but it has never been quantified despite numerous experiments, as the ecologist explains. “We used to define characteristics manually, measuring the distance between the eyes, and so on. These are simplistic criteria that are accessible to our conscious mind but do not at all reflect the reality of how our brain processes information…” And even less so by the brain of a mandrill.
Determined to discover what goes on beneath a monkey’s skin without having to touch it, the researcher had an idea: to train an AI to process information in the same way as these primates’ brains. “When we train an AI to recognize images that we humans find similar as similar, it creates a representational space correlated with our own. It will, for example, fall victim to the same optical illusions as we do, ” explains Julien Renoult. “An AI capable of predicting the resemblance perceived by mandrills will therefore replicate this species’ encoding mode.” Provided it is trained to…
Black box
And it was in Gabon that Julien Renoult and his doctoral students were able to gather the data needed to conduct the experiment. Thanks to the assistance of Marie Charpentier, a researcher atISEM and director of the Mandrillus Project, they gained access to the world’s only population of wild mandrills accustomed to humans. A group of 350 individuals that the team members photographed over a period of four years, compiling more than 80,000 portraits. A database that the researcher uses to train his AI to recognize mandrills by their faces. (The Mandrillus Face Database: A portrait image database for individual and sex recognition, and age prediction in a non-human primate, in Data in Brief, April 2023). “I give it dozens of different photos of the same mandrill, telling it that they are all of the same individual. Thanks to the neural network, the AI has billions of parameters to find the relevant information and establish the resemblance, just as a mandrill’s brain would.”
Trained in this way, the AI was able to establish levels of resemblance between different individuals and confirm, for example, that there was indeed a greater physical resemblance between paternal half-sisters than between maternal half-sisters, which could explain the greater affinity observed. (Same father, same face: Deep learning reveals selection for signaling kinship in a wild primate, Science Advances, May 2020). But while the AI appears to accurately describe a biological reality, the mechanism by which it operates remains opaque for now. “It’s true that AI is a black box because I don’t know what it bases itself on to determine these similarities, but that’s not a limitation of AI,” argues Julien Renoult. “The limitation is our capacity for understanding, but the advantage of AI viewed as a kind of artificial brain is that we can study it without fear of causing animal suffering.” Clever… just like a monkey!
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- Cefe (CNRS, UM, IRD, EPHE, INRAE, Institut Agro, UPVM)
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