Learning Keypoints for Multi-Agent Behavior Analysis using Self-Supervision

Daniel Khalil, Christina Liu, Pietro Perona, Jennifer Sun, Markus Marks; Proceedings of the Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV), 2025, pp. 578-588

The study of social interactions and collective behaviors through multi-agent video analysis is crucial in biology. While self-supervised keypoint discovery has emerged as a promising solution to reduce the need for manual keypoint annotations existing methods often struggle with videos containing multiple interacting agents especially those of the same species and color. To address this we introduce B-KinD-multi a novel approach that leverages pre-trained video segmentation models to guide keypoint discovery in multi-agent scenarios. This eliminates the need for time-consuming manual annotations on new experimental settings and organisms. Extensive evaluations demonstrate improved keypoint regression and downstream behavioral classification in videos of flies mice and rats. Furthermore our method generalizes well to other species including ants bees and humans highlighting its potential for broad applications in automated keypoint annotation for multi-agent behavior analysis. Code available under: B-KinD-Multi