AI detects autism patterns

AI turns mouse movements into language-like tokens, uncovering autism-related social behavior patterns

July 1, 2026
10:41 pm

An artificial intelligence model capable of reading and interpreting animal behavior like language has been developed by researchers at KAIST. The team created an AI model that learns behavioral data in a manner similar to natural language and was able to independently identify social behavioral deficits in an autism mouse model, opening a new avenue for interpretable neuroscience.

A research team led by Professor Dae-Soo Kim from the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences has developed an AI model that interprets animal movements as a form of behavioral language. The study is published in the International Journal of Computer Vision (IJCV).

The researchers transformed skeletal movements of mice into tokens, analogous to words in natural language, and trained a transformer-based model to learn behavioral meaning. The resulting model, named BehaVERT, successfully identified core social behavioral abnormalities in an autism mouse model without being provided any prior biological knowledge.

AI turns mouse movements into language-like tokens, uncovering autism-related social behavior patterns

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