[LUM#22] Animal intelligence
The mechanisms of animal perception remain a mystery, and their study is sometimes to the detriment of the subjects' well-being. What if artificial intelligence enabled us to model this perception and study it in silico? This is the hypothesis put forward by Julien Renoult, researcher at the Center for Functional and Evolutionary Ecology1is experimenting with mandrills as part of the Wildcom AI.
Nepotism is not unique to humans. Nepotism is a practice observed in many animal species, including mandrills, primates living in mother-centered matriarchal societies. " Mandrills show a stronger affiliation between paternal half-sisters than between those who share the same mother," explains CEFE researcher Julien Renoult. This observation is astonishing, since in this species, males roam between groups, carrying out clandestine matings. How, then, can mandrills have such detailed knowledge of their level of paternal relatedness?(Mandrill mothers associate with infants who look like their own offspring using phenotype matching, in eLife science, November 2022).
Under the monkey skin
The hypothesis of kinship recognition 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 by hand, measure the distance between the eyes, etc. These are simplistic criteria that are now accessible to all. Simplistic criteria which are accessible to our consciousness, but which in no way represent the reality of information processing by our brains..." And even less so by the brain of a mandrill.
Determined to discover what goes on under monkey skin without having to touch it, the researcher has an idea: train an AI to learn how to process information, modeled on the primate brain. "When we train an AI to recognize as similar images that we humans find similar, it constitutes a space of representation correlated to ours. 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 reproduce the encoding mode of this species." Provided it is trained to do so...
Black box
And it was in Gabon that Julien Renoult and his PhD students were able to gather the material to attempt the experiment. With the help of Marie Charpentier, 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 team members photographed over 4 years, compiling over 80,000 portraits. A database that the researcher is using 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 him dozens of different photos of the same mandrill, telling him it's the same individual. Thanks to the neural network, the AI has billions of parameters at its disposal to find the relevant information and establish the resemblance, just as a mandrill's brain would."
Thus trained, 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 affiliation observed.(Same father, same face: Deep learning reveals selection for signaling kinship in a wild primate, Science advances, May 2020). But while AI does seem to describe a biological reality, the mechanism by which it operates remains opaque for the moment. It's true that AI is a black box, because I don't know what it's based on to determine these similarities, but that's not the limit of AI," argues Julien Renoult. The limit is our ability to understand, but the advantage of an AI envisaged as a kind of artificial brain is that we can study it without fear of generating animal suffering." Clever... like a monkey!
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- Cefe (CNRS, UM, IRD, EPHE, INRAE, Institut Agro, UPVM)
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