{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/animal2vec-and-meerkat-a-self-supervised","title":"animal2vec and MeerKAT: A self-supervised transformer for rare-event raw audio input and a large-scale reference dataset for bioacoustics","arxiv_id":"2406.01253","date":"2024-06-03","proceeding":null,"authors":["Julian C. Schäfer-Zimmermann","Vlad Demartsev","Baptiste Averly","Kiran Dhanjal-Adams","Mathieu Duteil","Gabriella Gall","Marius Faiß","Lily Johnson-Ulrich","Dan Stowell","Marta B. Manser","Marie A. Roch","Ariana Strandburg-Peshkin"],"abstract":"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.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.01253v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2406.01253v2.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"animal2vec-and-meerkat-a-self-supervised","repo_url":"https://github.com/livingingroups/animal2vec","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"audio-classification","task_name":"Audio Classification"},{"task_slug":"benchmarking","task_name":"Benchmarking"},{"task_slug":"few-shot-learning","task_name":"Few-Shot Learning"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[{"slug":"meerkat-meerkat-kalahari-audio-transcripts","name":"MeerKAT: Meerkat Kalahari Audio Transcripts","full_name":""}],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[{"leaderboard":"/sota/audio-classification-on-meerkat-meerkat","task":"Audio Classification","dataset":"MeerKAT: Meerkat Kalahari Audio Transcripts","model":"animal2vec","rank_in_archive_order":1,"of":1,"metrics":{"AP":"0.91"},"uses_additional_data":false}],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}