Abigail G. Grassick, Jerome Tze-Hou Hsu, Ethan Lin +10cs.CV
Recent advances in field technology have led to a massive influx of in-the-wild video data for ecological science. The primary bottleneck in leveraging this data is the high cost of expert annotation. While computer vision offers a potential solution, current models frequently fail when deployed in complex marine environments. To characterize these failures, we introduce WildFin, a novel benchmark for fish behavior recognition collected and annotated by ecologists. WildFin spans two critical real-world paradigms: stationary cameras monitoring groups of fish and dynamic divers following individual subjects. The dataset represents a massive curation effort, involving 1,350 hours of fieldwork and 600 hours of expert annotation to produce 9 hours of behavioral data with over 2 million frame-by-frame labels. We benchmark modern vision foundation models and quantify tradeoffs between static and spatiotemporal architectures, revealing the substantial gap that remains between current model capabilities and the demands of real-world underwater behavioral analysis. Project website: https://team-wildfin.github.io/.
Ambivalence and hesitancy are subtle behavioral states that are expressed through a combination of verbal content, facial behavior, visual context, and acoustic cues. Effective recognition therefore requires not only extracting informative unimodal representations, but also modeling how temporally aligned behavioral evidence interacts across modalities. In this paper, we propose a synchronized visual-facial cross-refinement framework (SVF-CR) with pairwise multimodal evidence fusion for ambivalence and hesitancy recognition. The proposed method first extracts whole-video segment tokens and cropped-face segment tokens using the same temporal partition. The synchronized visual and facial tokens are refined through intra-modal self-attention and bidirectional visual-facial cross-attention, allowing whole-video context and local facial behavior to mutually refine each other before evidence construction. We then construct segment-level visual-facial evidence using consistency and discrepancy modeling, followed by temporal self-attention and attention pooling. Textual and acoustic features are lightly refined through context self-attention and are fused with the enhanced visual-facial evidence at the final decision stage using pairwise evidence fusion. Experiments on the BAH (Behavioral Ambivalence/Hesitancy) public evaluation split show that the proposed synchronized visual-facial cross-refinement improves public macro-F1 over both global visual-face token fusion and synchronized evidence baselines, achieving a public macro-F1 of 0.7156. Code is available at : https://github.com/hiinnnii/BAH-Challenge-ECCV2026\_SVF-CR.