Abstract Recent advances in deep learning have greatly enhanced the accuracy and scalability of animal re-identification by automating the extraction of subtle distinguishing features from images and videos. This enables large-scale, non-invasive monitoring of animal populations. This article proposes a segmentation pipeline and a re-identification model to identify animals without ground-truth IDs. The segmentation pipeline isolates animals from the background using bounding boxes and leverages the DINOv2 and Segment Anything Model 2 (SAM2) foundation models. For re-identification, Recurrence over Video Frames (RoVF) is introduced, a novel approach that employs a recurrent component based on the Perceiver transformer atop a DINOv2 image model, iteratively refining embeddings from video frames. The proposed methods are evaluated on video datasets of meerkats and polar bears (PolarBearVidID). The proposed segmentation model achieved high accuracy (94.36% and 97.26%) and IoU (73.14% and 92.77%) for meerkats and polar bears, respectively. RoVF outperformed frame- and video-based re-identification baselines, achieving a top-1 accuracy of 46.5% and 55% on masked test sets for meerkats and polar bears, respectively, as well as higher top-3 accuracy. These results highlight the potential of the proposed approach to reduce annotation burdens in future individual-based ecological studies. The code is available at https://github.com/Strong-AI-Lab/RoVF-Meerkat-Reidentification .

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong capabilities in language understanding and generation, and their potential in educational contexts is increasingly being explored. One promising area is learnersourcing, where students engage in creating their own educational content, such as multiple-choice questions. A critical step in this process is generating effective explanations for the solutions to these questions, as such explanations aid in peer understanding and promote deeper conceptual learning. However, students often find it difficult to craft high-quality explanations due to limited understanding or gaps in their subject knowledge. To support this task, we introduce ``ILearner-LLM,'' a framework that uses iterative enhancement with LLMs to improve generated explanations. The framework combines an explanation generation model and an explanation evaluation model fine-tuned using student preferences for quality, where feedback from the evaluation model is fed back into the generation model to refine the output. Our experiments with LLaMA2-13B and GPT-4 using five large datasets from the PeerWise MCQ platform show that ILearner-LLM produces explanations of higher quality that closely align with those written by students. Our findings represent a promising approach for enriching the learnersourcing experience for students and for leveraging the capabilities of large language models for educational applications.

Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) learns a reward function to explain expert demonstrations. Modern IRL methods often use the adversarial (minimax) formulation that alternates between reward and policy optimization, which often lead to {\em unstable} training. Recent non-adversarial IRL approaches improve stability by jointly learning reward and policy via energy-based formulations but lack formal guarantees. This work bridges this gap. We first present a *unified* view showing canonical non-adversarial methods explicitly or implicitly maximize the likelihood of expert behavior, which is equivalent to minimizing the expected return gap. This insight leads to our main contribution: *Trust Region Reward Optimization* (TRRO), a framework that guarantees *monotonic* improvement in this likelihood via a Minorization-Maximization process. We instantiate TRRO into *Proximal Inverse Reward Optimization* (PIRO), a practical and stable IRL algorithm. Theoretically, TRRO provides the IRL counterpart to the stability guarantees of Trust Region Policy Optimization (TRPO) in forward RL. Empirically, PIRO matches or surpasses state-of-the-art baselines in reward recovery, policy imitation with high sample efficiency on MuJoCo and Gym-Robotics benchmarks and a real-world animal behavior modeling task.

Despite impressive performance on language modelling and complex reasoning tasks, Large Language Models (LLMs) fall short on the same tasks in uncommon settings or with distribution shifts, exhibiting a lack of generalisation ability.By contrast, systems such as causal models, that learn abstract variables and causal relationships, can demonstrate increased robustness against changes in the distribution.One reason for this success is the existence and use of Independent Causal Mechanisms (ICMs) representing high-level concepts that only sparsely interact.In this work, we apply two concepts from causality to learn ICMs within LLMs.We develop a new LLM architecture composed of multiple sparsely interacting language modelling modules.We show that such causal constraints can improve out-ofdistribution performance on abstract and causal reasoning tasks.We also investigate the level of independence and domain specialisation and show that LLMs rely on pre-trained partially domain-invariant mechanisms resilient to finetuning.

The process of generating data such as images is controlled by independent and unknown factors of variation. The retrieval of these variables has been studied extensively in the disentanglement, causal representation learning, and independent component analysis fields. Recently, approaches merging these domains together have shown great success. Instead of directly representing the factors of variation, the problem of disentanglement can be seen as finding the interventions on one image that yield a change to a single factor. Following this assumption, we introduce a new method for disentanglement inspired by causal dynamics that combines causality theory with vector-quantized variational autoencoders. Our model considers the quantized vectors as causal variables and links them in a causal graph. It performs causal interventions on the graph and generates atomic transitions affecting a unique factor of variation in the image. We also introduce a new task of action retrieval that consists of finding the action responsible for the transition between two images. We test our method on standard synthetic and real-world disentanglement datasets. We show that it can effectively disentangle the factors of variation and perform precise interventions on high-level semantic attributes of an image without affecting its quality, even with imbalanced data distributions.