1. Social network analysis, which has been widely adopted in animal studies over the past decade, enables the revelation of global characteristic patterns of animal social systems from pairwise inter-individual relations. Animal social networks are typically drawn based on the geometric proximity and/or frequency of social behaviours (e.g. grooming), but the appropriate metric for inter-individual relationship is not clear, especially when prior knowledge on the species/data is limited.
2. In this study, researchers explored a nonparametric analysis of inter-individual relations using a neural network with the attention mechanism, which plays a central role in natural language processing. The high interpretability of the attention mechanism and flexibility of the entire neural network allow for automatic detection of inter-individual relations included in the raw data, without requiring prior knowledge/assumptions about what modes/types of relations are included in the data. For these case studies, three-dimensional location data collected from simulated agents and real Japanese macaques were analysed.
3. The proposed method successfully recovered the latent relations behind the simulated data and discovered female-oriented relations in the real data, which are in accordance with the previous generalizations about the macaque social structure.
4. The proposed method does not exploit any behavioural patterns that are particular to Japanese macaques, and researchers can use it for location data of other animals. The flexibility of the neural network would also allow for its application to a wide variety of data with interacting components, such as vocal communication.

中文翻译：

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使用基于注意力的神经网络对个体间关系进行非参数分析

1. 社会网络分析在过去十年中被广泛用于动物研究，它能够从成对的个体间关系揭示动物社会系统的全球特征模式。动物社交网络通常是根据几何接近度和/或社交行为（例如梳理毛发）的频率绘制的，但个体间关系的适当度量尚不清楚，尤其是当对物种/数据的先验知识有限时。
2. 在这项研究中，研究人员使用具有注意力机制的神经网络探索了对个体间关系的非参数分析，该机制在自然语言处理中发挥着核心作用。注意力机制的高度可解释性和整个神经网络的灵活性允许自动检测原始数据中包含的个体间关系，而不需要关于数据中包含哪些模式/关系类型的先验知识/假设。对于这些案例研究，分析了从模拟代理和真实日本猕猴收集的三维位置数据。
3. 所提出的方法成功地恢复了模拟数据背后的潜在关系，并在真实数据中发现了以女性为导向的关系，这与之前对猕猴社会结构的概括是一致的。
4. 所提出的方法没有利用日本猕猴特有的任何行为模式，研究人员可以将其用于其他动物的位置数据。神经网络的灵活性还允许将其应用于具有交互组件的各种数据，例如语音通信。