How AI trained on birds is surfacing underwater mysteries

Google Research and Google DeepMind present a paper showing that Perch 2.0, a bioacoustics foundation model trained on birds and terrestrial animals, can be used for transfer learning to classify whale vocalizations, and they release a Colab tutorial.

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In our latest paper, “Perch 2.0 transfers 'whale' to underwater tasks”, a collaboration between Google Research and Google DeepMind presented at the NeurIPS 2025 workshop on AI for Non-Human Animal Communications, we deep dive into these results. We show how this bioacoustics foundation model, trained mostly on bird data, can be used to enable and scale insights for underwater marine ecosystems, particularly for classifying whale vocalizations. We are also sharing an end-to-end tutorial in Google Colab for our agile modeling workflow, demonstrating how to use Perch 2.0 to create a custom classifier for whale vocalizations using the NOAA NCEI Passive Acoustic Data Archive through Google Cloud.
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