Interaction valence reveals contrasting social networks in dairy cattle

arXiv:2608.19222v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Social relationships shape access to resources, exposure to conflict and group stability, yet automated livestock monitoring typically treats behaviour as isolated events. Here, we present a valence-aware social-network framework that transforms video-derived interactions into herd-level representations of affiliative and agonistic organization. A pose-based computer-vision pipeline analysed 7 h 39 min of continuous video from the pre-milking area of one commercial dairy farm. After quality control, 1,183 of 1,414 candidate interactions remained, involving 36 cows and 177 dyads. In a predicted-class-balanced audit of 198 pipeline-detected clips, automated and manual labels agreed in 82.8% of cases, with an unweighted audit-sample macro-F1 of 0.872. These values describe the audited sample rather than prevalence-weighted or end-to-end deployment performance. The aggregated network was connected (density = 0.281; transitivity = 0.513; mean path length = 1.88), and predicted affiliative events formed five algorithmic communities (modularity Q = 0.429). Within the observed zone, predicted agonistic interactions comprised 72.4% of retained events and 76.0% of interaction duration. The cow with the most partners did not have the highest betweenness centrality. Separating events by predicted valence produced descriptively different affiliative and agonistic layers, with contrasting edge sets, community partitions and individual positions. Thus, pooled interaction counts can obscure the behavioural composition of an observed network. Valence-aware analysis provides a framework for testing hypotheses about competition, affiliation and welfare-relevant change, while requiring longitudinal validation before use as a welfare or health indicator.

Source: arXiv cs.AI | 2026-08-21

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