Vowel- and Diphthong-Like Spectral Patterns in Sperm Whale Codas

Tue, 05 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

This paper follows up on predictions obtained from generative models in Approaching an unknown communication system by latent space exploration and causal inference and uncovers patterns corresponding to vowels and diphthongs in the communication of sperm whales.

The work has received significant attention, with selected media coverage collected on the Media & Honors page, as well as more than 1.7 million initial impressions on X:

Sperm whales have equivalents to human vowels.

We uncovered spectral properties in whales’ clicks that are recurrent across whales, independent of traditional types, and compositional.

We got clues to look into spectral properties from our AI interpretability technique CDEV. pic.twitter.com/8sEAzPkMfo
— Gašper Beguš (@begusgasper) December 5, 2023

Approaching an unknown communication system by latent space exploration and causal inference

Mon, 20 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The paper proposes a novel methodology - Causal Disentanglement with Extreme Values (CDEV) - to identify representations learned by a Generative adversarial network (GAN) trained on raw whale communication, proposing – for the first time – specific acoustic attributes that might serve as carriers of meaning.

Followed up in Vowels and Diphthongs in Sperm Whales, which identified concrete patterns in the communication system corresponding to the predicted attributes.

This work has received significant attention, with selected media coverage collected on the Media & Honors page.

Journal article | Andrej Leban

Vowel- and Diphthong-Like Spectral Patterns in Sperm Whale Codas

Approaching an unknown communication system by latent space exploration and causal inference