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author Mueller, Felix B.
Meier, Jan F.
Lueddecke, Timo
Vogg, Richard
Freixanet, Roger L.
Hassler, Valentin
Bosshard, Tiffany
Karakoc, Elif
O'Hearn, William J.
Pereira, Sofia M.
Sehner, Sandro
Wierucka, Kaja
Burkart, Judith
Fichtel, Claudia
Fischer, Julia
Gail, Alexander
Hobaiter, Catherine
Ostner, Julia
Samuni, Liran
Schülke, Oliver
Shahidi, Neda
Wessling, Erin G.
Ecker, Alexander S.
author_facet Mueller, Felix B.
Meier, Jan F.
Lueddecke, Timo
Vogg, Richard
Freixanet, Roger L.
Hassler, Valentin
Bosshard, Tiffany
Karakoc, Elif
O'Hearn, William J.
Pereira, Sofia M.
Sehner, Sandro
Wierucka, Kaja
Burkart, Judith
Fichtel, Claudia
Fischer, Julia
Gail, Alexander
Hobaiter, Catherine
Ostner, Julia
Samuni, Liran
Schülke, Oliver
Shahidi, Neda
Wessling, Erin G.
Ecker, Alexander S.
contents Non-human primates are our closest living relatives, and analyzing their behavior is central to research in cognition, evolution, and conservation. Computer vision could greatly aid this research, but existing methods often rely on human-centric pretrained models and focus on single datasets, which limits generalization. We address this limitation by shifting from a model-centric to a data-centric approach and introduce PriVi, a large-scale primate-centric video pretraining dataset. PriVi contains 424 hours of curated video, combining 174 hours from behavioral research across 11 settings with 250 hours of diverse web-sourced footage, assembled through a scalable data curation pipeline. We continue pretraining V-JEPA, a large-scale video model, on PriVi to learn primate-specific representations and evaluate it using a lightweight frozen classifier. Across four benchmark datasets, ChimpACT, PanAf500, BaboonLand, and ChimpBehave, our approach consistently outperforms prior work, including fully finetuned baselines, and scales favorably with fewer labels. These results demonstrate for the first time that domain-level pretraining, where pretraining is conducted on similar data but not the target dataset itself, works for video models. Our primate-centric pretraining substantially improves data efficiency and generalization, making it a promising approach for low-label applications. Dataset, code, and models are available: https://privi.eckerlab.org
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_09675
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle PriVi: Towards A General-Purpose Video Model For Primate Behavior In The Wild
Mueller, Felix B.
Meier, Jan F.
Lueddecke, Timo
Vogg, Richard
Freixanet, Roger L.
Hassler, Valentin
Bosshard, Tiffany
Karakoc, Elif
O'Hearn, William J.
Pereira, Sofia M.
Sehner, Sandro
Wierucka, Kaja
Burkart, Judith
Fichtel, Claudia
Fischer, Julia
Gail, Alexander
Hobaiter, Catherine
Ostner, Julia
Samuni, Liran
Schülke, Oliver
Shahidi, Neda
Wessling, Erin G.
Ecker, Alexander S.
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
I.4
Non-human primates are our closest living relatives, and analyzing their behavior is central to research in cognition, evolution, and conservation. Computer vision could greatly aid this research, but existing methods often rely on human-centric pretrained models and focus on single datasets, which limits generalization. We address this limitation by shifting from a model-centric to a data-centric approach and introduce PriVi, a large-scale primate-centric video pretraining dataset. PriVi contains 424 hours of curated video, combining 174 hours from behavioral research across 11 settings with 250 hours of diverse web-sourced footage, assembled through a scalable data curation pipeline. We continue pretraining V-JEPA, a large-scale video model, on PriVi to learn primate-specific representations and evaluate it using a lightweight frozen classifier. Across four benchmark datasets, ChimpACT, PanAf500, BaboonLand, and ChimpBehave, our approach consistently outperforms prior work, including fully finetuned baselines, and scales favorably with fewer labels. These results demonstrate for the first time that domain-level pretraining, where pretraining is conducted on similar data but not the target dataset itself, works for video models. Our primate-centric pretraining substantially improves data efficiency and generalization, making it a promising approach for low-label applications. Dataset, code, and models are available: https://privi.eckerlab.org
title PriVi: Towards A General-Purpose Video Model For Primate Behavior In The Wild
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
I.4
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.09675