ePoster · Neuroscience
TweetyBERT, a self-supervised vision transformer to automate birdsong annotation
George Vengrovski, Miranda Rose Hulsey-Vincent, Melissa Bemrose, Tim Gardner · COSYNE 2025
Manual annotation of birdsong remains a significant bottleneck in systems neuroscience, especially for species like canaries with complex vocal repertoires. Existing unsupervised dimensionality reduction approaches, such as Uniform Manifold and Projection (UMAP), can be used to analyze stereotyped songs but require extensive preprocessing. Alternatively, current deep-learning models for song annotation still require extensive training data . We present TweetyBERT, a novel self-supervised deep neural network that learns to parse complex birdsongs without annotated training data. The process res