Mimicry Madness

Project repo for mimicry exploration during FuncaPalooza 2025! We're mostly focused on snakes and moths & wasps.

More coming soon!

Installation

Before using this package, please install uv (directions for doing so can be found here).

All necessary packages should be automatically installed when uv run is used for the first time.

Using the package

This package can be utilized entirely from the command line! To generate the embeddings for a set of images, simply run:

uv run python -m mimicry_madness.embed ...

with the following parameters:

• --img_src: folder to read images from (either .png, .jpg, or .jpeg format).
• --emb_dest: filepath to save embedding file to.
• -b or --batch_size: batch size to read images in.

To visualize the embeddings (in a very simple manner), use:

uv run python -m mimicry_madness.visualize ...

with the following parameters:

• --emb_src: path to embeddings.pt file.
• --pca_dest: path to save PCA plot to.

Interactive Visualization

You can visualize the embeddings interactively by running the following command from the base folder of the repository:

uv run python visualization/viz_dashboard.py

Note that there must be an embeddings/ directory within your local copy of the data/ directory. Embeddings can be generated using the instructions above (Using the package). You can then select the embeddings file you want to use (must be stored in the embeddings folder), and the PCA visualization will appear.