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What Does Animal Re-Identification Learn? Linear Biological Concepts and Their Origins in Visual Representations

arXiv · AI, language, vision and robotics · article · Sep 5, 2026 · UTC

Conservation increasingly relies on camera traps that collect more wildlife imagery than experts can manually analyze, making animal re-identification (Re-ID) essential for monitoring individuals and populations. Yet understanding which cues drive model decisions is challenging for ViT-based Re-ID models, whose metric-learning objectives provide no explicit supervision for biological concepts. We ask whether such models nonetheless organize their representations along biologically meaningful axes. Using a DINOv3 backbone fine-tuned for Western lowland gorilla Re-ID with triplet-margin loss, we

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