Rodent-Bench

Thomas Heap, Laurence Aitchison, Emma Cahill, Adriana Casado Rodriguez

Track: Track 1: Original Research/Position/Education/Attention Track

Keywords: MLLMs, Rodents, Benchmark

TL;DR: We introduce Rodent-Bench, a benchmark for evaluating MLLMs on rodent behavior annotation, and find that current state-of-the-art models (Gemini-2.5-Pro, Gemini-2.5-Flash, Qwen-VL-Max) perform too poorly for practical scientific use.

Abstract: We present Rodent-Bench, a novel benchmark designed to evaluate the ability of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to annotate rodent behaviour footage. We evaluate state-of-the-art MLLMs, including Gemini-2.5-Pro, Gemini-2.5-Flash and Qwen-VL-Max, using this benchmark and find that none of these models perform strongly enough to be used as an assistant for this task. Our benchmark encompasses diverse datasets spanning multiple behavioral paradigms including social interactions, grooming, scratching, and freezing behaviors, with videos ranging from 10 minutes to 35 minutes in length. We provide two benchmark versions to accommodate varying model capabilities and establish standardized evaluation metrics including second-wise accuracy, macro F1, mean average precision, mutual information, and Matthew's correlation coefficient. While some models show modest performance on certain datasets (notably grooming detection), overall results reveal significant challenges in temporal segmentation, handling extended video sequences, and distinguishing subtle behavioral states. Our analysis identifies key limitations in current MLLMs for scientific video annotation and provides insights for future model development. Rodent-Bench serves as a foundation for tracking progress toward reliable automated behavioral annotation in neuroscience research.

Submission Number: 56