arXiv subjects

Jeffrey Markowitz

Publications and source records attributed to Jeffrey Markowitz.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

BehaviorVLM: Unified Finetuning-Free Behavioral Understanding with Vision-Language Reasoning

Understanding freely moving animal behavior is central to neuroscience, where pose estimation and behavioral understanding form the foundation for linking neural activity to natural actions. Yet both tasks still depend heavily on human annotation or unstable unsupervised pipelines, limiting scalability and reproducibility. We present BehaviorVLM, a unified vision-language framework for pose estimation and behavioral understanding that requires no task-specific finetuning and minimal human labeling by guiding pretrained Vision-Language Models (VLMs) through detailed, explicit, and verifiable reasoning steps. For pose estimation, we leverage quantum-dot-grounded behavioral data and propose a multi-stage pipeline that integrates temporal, spatial, and cross-view reasoning. This design greatly reduces human annotation effort, exposes low-confidence labels through geometric checks such as reprojection error, and produces labels that can later be filtered, corrected, or used to fine-tune downstream pose models. For behavioral understanding, we propose a pipeline that integrates deep embedded clustering for over-segmented behavior discovery, VLM-based per-clip video captioning, and LLM-based reasoning to merge and semantically label behavioral segments. The behavioral pipeline can operate directly from visual information and does not require keypoints to segment behavior. Together, these components enable scalable, interpretable, and label-light analysis of multi-animal behavior.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Inverse Reinforcement Learning with Switching Rewards and History Dependency for Characterizing Animal Behaviors

Traditional approaches to studying decision-making in neuroscience focus on simplified behavioral tasks where animals perform repetitive, stereotyped actions to receive explicit rewards. While informative, these methods constrain our understanding of decision-making to short timescale behaviors driven by explicit goals. In natural environments, animals exhibit more complex, long-term behaviors driven by intrinsic motivations that are often unobservable. Recent works in time-varying inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) aim to capture shifting motivations in long-term, freely moving behaviors. However, a crucial challenge remains: animals make decisions based on their history, not just their current state. To address this, we introduce SWIRL (SWitching IRL), a novel framework that extends traditional IRL by incorporating time-varying, history-dependent reward functions. SWIRL models long behavioral sequences as transitions between short-term decision-making processes, each governed by a unique reward function. SWIRL incorporates biologically plausible history dependency to capture how past decisions and environmental contexts shape behavior, offering a more accurate description of animal decision-making. We apply SWIRL to simulated and real-world animal behavior datasets and show that it outperforms models lacking history dependency, both quantitatively and qualitatively. This work presents the first IRL model to incorporate history-dependent policies and rewards to advance our understanding of complex, naturalistic decision-making in animals.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2022

Characterizing the structure of mouse behavior using Motion Sequencing

Spontaneous mouse behavior is composed from repeatedly-used modules of movement (e.g., rearing, running, grooming) that are flexibly placed into sequences whose content evolves over time. By identifying behavioral modules and the order in which they are expressed, researchers can gain insight into the impact of drugs, genes, context, sensory stimuli and neural activity on behavior. Here we present a protocol for performing Motion Sequencing (MoSeq), an ethologically-inspired method that uses 3D machine vision and unsupervised machine learning to decompose spontaneous mouse behavior in the laboratory into a series of elemental modules called "syllables". This protocol is based upon a notebook-based pipeline for MoSeq that includes modules for depth video acquisition, data pre-processing and modeling, as well as a standardized set of visualization tools. Users are provided with instructions and code for building a MoSeq imaging rig and acquiring three-dimensional video of spontaneous mouse behavior for submission to the modeling framework; the outputs of this protocol include syllable labels for each frame of video data as well as summary plots describing how often each syllable was used and how syllables transitioned from one to the other over time. This protocol and the accompanying pipeline significantly lower the bar for adopting this unsupervised, data-driven approach to characterizing mouse behavior, enabling users without significant computational ethology experience to gain insight into how the structure of behavior is altered after experimental manipulations.

q-bio.QM↗