English
Related papers

Related papers: Empowered Neural Cellular Automata

200 papers

Humans and animals explore their environment and acquire useful skills even in the absence of clear goals, exhibiting intrinsic motivation. The study of intrinsic motivation in artificial agents is concerned with the following question:…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-08 Nicholas Rhinehart , Jenny Wang , Glen Berseth , John D. Co-Reyes , Danijar Hafner , Chelsea Finn , Sergey Levine

Multi-agent reinforcement learning has shown promise on a variety of cooperative tasks as a consequence of recent developments in differentiable inter-agent communication. However, most architectures are limited to pools of homogeneous…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2019-09-13 Bowen Jing , William Yin

Embodied agents are expected to operate persistently in dynamic physical environments, continuously acquiring new capabilities over time. Existing approaches to improving agent performance often rely on modifying the agent itself -- through…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Xue Qin , Simin Luan , John See , Cong Yang , Zhijun Li

Artificial intelligence research to a great degree focuses on the brain and behaviors that the brain generates. But the brain, an extremely complex structure resulting from millions of years of evolution, can be viewed as a solution to…

Neurons and Cognition · Quantitative Biology 2017-03-07 Thomas E. Portegys

In Model-Based Reinforcement Learning (MBRL), incorporating causal structures into dynamics models provides agents with a structured understanding of the environments, enabling efficient decision. Empowerment as an intrinsic motivation…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-02-17 Hongye Cao , Fan Feng , Meng Fang , Shaokang Dong , Tianpei Yang , Jing Huo , Yang Gao

In nature, biological organisms jointly evolve both their morphology and their neurological capabilities to improve their chances for survival. Consequently, task information is encoded in both their brains and their bodies. In robotics,…

Robotics · Computer Science 2020-06-15 Ana Pervan , Todd D. Murphey

We introduce Neural Particle Automata (NPA), a Lagrangian generalization of Neural Cellular Automata (NCA) from static lattices to dynamic particle systems. Unlike classical Eulerian NCA where cells are pinned to pixels or voxels, NPA model…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2026-01-23 Hyunsoo Kim , Ehsan Pajouheshgar , Sabine Süsstrunk , Wenzel Jakob , Jinah Park

Cellular automata and their differentiable counterparts, Neural Cellular Automata (NCA), are highly expressive and capable of surprisingly complex behaviors. This paper explores how NCAs perform when applied to tasks requiring precise…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2025-12-03 Kevin Xu , Risto Miikkulainen

Identifying controllable aspects of the environment has proven to be an extraordinary intrinsic motivator to reinforcement learning agents. Despite repeatedly achieving State-of-the-Art results, this approach has only been studied as a…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-02-18 Oriol Corcoll , Youssef Mohamed , Raul Vicente

Artificial Intelligence has historically relied on planning, heuristics, and handcrafted approaches designed by experts. All the while claiming to pursue the creation of Intelligence. This approach fails to acknowledge that intelligence…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2020-03-27 Jordan Ott

Regulation of cell proliferation is a crucial aspect of tissue development and homeostasis and plays a major role in morphogenesis, wound healing, and tumor invasion. A phenomenon of such regulation is contact inhibition, which describes…

Cell Behavior · Quantitative Biology 2024-07-01 Steffen Lange , Jannik Schmied , Paul Willam , Anja Voss-Böhme

Neural Cellular Automata (NCA) have shown a remarkable ability to learn the required rules to "grow" images, classify morphologies, segment images, as well as to do general computation such as path-finding. We believe the inductive prior…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-05-18 Alexander Mordvintsev , Eyvind Niklasson , Ettore Randazzo

Biological systems are notorious for complex behavior within short timescales (e.g. metabolic activity) and longer time scales (e.g. evolutionary selection), along with their complex spatial organization. Because of their complexity and…

Cellular Automata and Lattice Gases · Physics 2021-09-14 Alyssa M Adams

Exploration is a difficult challenge in reinforcement learning and is of prime importance in sparse reward environments. However, many of the state of the art deep reinforcement learning algorithms, that rely on epsilon-greedy, fail on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-10-15 Navneet Madhu Kumar

Cellular automata (CA) captivate researchers due to teh emergent, complex individualized behavior that simple global rules of interaction enact. Recent advances in the field have combined CA with convolutional neural networks to achieve…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2023-01-04 Marlene Grieskamp , Chaytan Inman , Shaun Lee

Computational power can be measured by assigning an algebraic structure to a computational device. Here, we convert a small patch of Conway's Game of Life into a transformation semigroup. The conversion captures not only time evolution but…

Cellular Automata and Lattice Gases · Physics 2026-04-17 Attila Egri-Nagy , Chrystopher L. Nehaniv

Neural Cellular Automata (NCAs) offer a way to study the growth of two-dimensional artificial organisms from a single seed cell. From the outset, NCA-grown organisms have had issues with stability, their natural boundary often breaking down…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2025-12-11 James Stovold

Recent work has shown how predictive modeling can endow agents with rich knowledge of their surroundings, improving their ability to act in complex environments. We propose question-answering as a general paradigm to decode and understand…

From an enactive approach, some previous studies have demonstrated that social interaction plays a fundamental role in the dynamics of neural and behavioral complexity of embodied agents. In particular, it has been shown that agents with a…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2020-11-04 Georgina Montserrat Reséndiz-Benhumea , Ekaterina Sangati , Tom Froese

Neural nets are powerful function approximators, but the behavior of a given neural net, once trained, cannot be easily modified. We wish, however, for people to be able to influence neural agents' actions despite the agents never training…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-01 Mycal Tucker , William Kuhl , Khizer Shahid , Seth Karten , Katia Sycara , Julie Shah