Disentangling 3d Pose Dynamics With Scrubbed Conditional Latent Variables
Joshua H Wu, Hari Koneru, J Russell Ravenel, Anshuman Sabath, James M Roach, Shaun SX Lim, Michael R Tadross, Alex H Williams, Timothy W Dunn
GitHub Paper Scroll downAbstract
Methods for tracking lab animal movements in unconstrained environments have become increasingly common and powerful tools for neuroscience. The prevailing hypothesis is that animal behavior in these environments comprises sequences of discrete stereotyped body movements ("motifs" or "actions"). However, the same action can occur at different speeds or heading directions, and the same action may manifest slightly differently across subjects due to, for example, variation in body size. These and other forms of nuisance variability complicate attempts to quantify animal behavior in terms of discrete action sequences and draw meaningful comparisons across individual subjects. To address this, we present a framework for motion analysis that uses conditional variational autoencoders in conjunction with adversarial learning paradigms to disentangle behavioral factors. We demonstrate the utility of this approach in downstream tasks such as clustering, decodability, and motion synthesis. Further, we apply our technique to improve disease detection in a Parkinsonian mouse model.