about
Meow-Omni 1: a multi-modal feline LLM (arxiv.org)
3 points by Otterly99 135 days ago | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: This system reads a cat's video, sounds, and body signals together, so the same purr can be read as relaxed or stressed instead of guessed from behavior alone. On an expert-checked test it identified intent correctly 71.16% of the time, beating leading vision-and-sound models.

Abstract · Meow-Omni 1: A Multimodal Large Language Model for Feline Ethology

Deciphering animal intent is a fundamental challenge in computational ethology, largely because of semantic aliasing, the phenomenon where identical external signals (e.g., a cat's purr) correspond to radically different internal states depending on physiological context. Existing Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are blind to high-frequency biological time-series data, restricting them to superficial behavioural pattern matching rather than genuine latent-state reasoning. To bridge this gap, we introduce Meow-Omni 1, the first open-source, quad-modal MLLM purpose-built for computational ethology. It natively fuses video, audio, and physiological time-series streams with textual reasoning. Through targeted architectural adaptation, we integrate specialized scientific encoders into a unified backbone and formalize intent inference via physiologically grounded cross-modal alignment. Evaluated on MeowBench, a novel, expert-verified quad-modal benchmark, Meow-Omni 1 achieves state-of-the-art intent-recognition accuracy (71.16%), substantially outperforming leading vision-language and omni-modal baselines. We release the complete open-source pipeline including model weights, training framework, and the Meow-10K dataset, to establish a scalable paradigm for inter-species intent understanding and to advance foundation models toward real-world veterinary diagnostics and wildlife conservation.

Jucheng Hu, Zhangquan Chen, Yulin Chen, Chengjie Hong, Liang Zhou, Tairan Wang, Sifei Li, Giulio Zhu, Feng Zhou, Yiheng Zeng, Suorong Yang, Dongzhan Zhou
arXiv:2605.09152 · cs.CL, q-bio.NC · submitted May 9, 2026
abstract · pdf · html

add comment on HN