SiLVi: Simple Interface for Labeling Video Interactions

Analyzing animal behavior is crucial in neuroscience, yet deciphering its intricate dynamics remains challenging. Traditional machine vision approaches detect spontaneous behaviors but are constrained by limited interpretability and reliance on manual labeling, restricting exploration of the full behavioral spectrum. Here, we introduce MouseGPT, an integrated vision-language model and analytical framework that translates raw video of animal activity into natural language to automate open-vocabulary behavior analysis. Built upon a comprehensive dataset of over 42 million frames spanning diverse psychiatric conditions, MouseGPT maps multi-view or single-camera recordings directly into computable semantic representations. An agentic framework leverages these representations for detailed behavior profiling, cross-view stable clustering, and zero-shot novel behavior discovery without requiring labor-intensive annotation. Surpassing conventional kinematics-based pipelines and generalist vision-language models in behavioral precision and adaptability, MouseGPT establishes continuous semantic representations as a powerful tool for deciphering complex ethological dynamics in animal models.

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.

Dense temporal annotation of procedural activity videos is vital for action understanding and embodied intelligence but remains labor-intensive due to reactive tools. Each correction is treated as an isolated edit, limiting reuse of information on annotator uncertainty and model reliability. We introduce IMPACT-Scribe, a correction-driven framework for dense labeling that uses each correction to improve future human-machine collaboration. IMPACT-Scribe combines uncertainty-aware boundary scribble supervision, local proposal modeling, cost-aware query planning, structured propagation, and correction-driven adaptation. Experiments and a human study show that this closed-loop design improves labeling quality per effort, enhances boundary accuracy, and fosters better human-machine interaction over time. The code will be made publicly available at https://github.com/BanzQians/IMPACT_AS.