[LUM#22] Animal intelligence

[LUM#22] Animal intelligence

[LUM Magazine, Podcast] - Published on November 20, 2024 in Science-Society

The mechanisms of animal perception remain a mystery and their study is sometimes done to the detriment of the well-being of the subjects. What if artificial intelligence allowed us to model this perception to study it in silico? This is the hypothesis that Julien Renoult, researcher at the Center for Functional and Evolutionary Ecology ¹ , is experimenting with mandrills as part of the Wildcom AI project .

© Julien Renoult

Favoring the family, or giving a "punch of the piston" as they say, is not unique to humans. Nepotism is a practice observed in many animal species, including mandrills, primates living in matriarchal societies centered on mothers. "We observe in mandrills a stronger affiliation between paternal half-sisters than between 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, carrying out clandestine matings. How can mandrills then have such a detailed knowledge of their level of paternal kinship? ( 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 a recognition of kinship based on facial resemblance seems the most obvious, but it has never been quantified despite numerous experiments, as the ecologist explains. "We defined characteristics by hand, we measured the distance between the eyes, etc. Simplistic criteria that are accessible to our consciousness but which do not at all represent the reality of the processing of information by our brain..." And even less by the brain of a mandrill.

Determined to discover what is happening under the monkey's skin without having to touch it, the researcher has an idea: to train an AI so that it learns to process information, based on the model of the brain of these primates. "When we train an AI to recognize as similar images that we humans find similar, it constitutes a representation space correlated to ours. It will, for example, be the victim of the same optical illusions as us," explains Julien Renoult. An AI capable of predicting the resemblance perceived by mandrills will therefore reproduce the encoding mode of this species." Provided that it is trained to...

Black box

And it was in Gabon that Julien Renoult and his doctoral students were able to gather the material to try the experiment. Thanks to the help of Marie Charpentier , a researcher at Isem and director of the Mandrillus project , they had access to the only population in the world of wild mandrills accustomed to humans. A group of 350 individuals that the team members photographed for 4 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 it is the same individual. Thanks to the neural network, AI has billions of parameters to find the relevant information and establish the resemblance, just like a mandrill's brain would do."

Thus trained, 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 if AI seems 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 uses to determine these resemblances, but that's not a limit of AI," argues Julien Renoult. The limit is our capacity for understanding, but the advantage of an AI considered as a kind of artificial brain is that we can study it without fear of generating animal suffering." Clever... like a monkey!

1. Cefe (CNRS, UM, IRD, EPHE, INRAE, Agro Institute, UPVM)
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Key words : IA, Artificial intelligence, LumLu, LUM Magazine, Research, Science, Company

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