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Related papers: Neural Cellular Automata: From Cells to Pixels

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Neural Cellular Automata (NCA) represent a powerful framework for modeling biological self-organization, extending classical rule-based systems with trainable, differentiable (or evolvable) update rules that capture the adaptive…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-09-16 Benedikt Hartl , Michael Levin , Léo Pio-Lopez

Neural Cellular Automata (NCAs) are a model of morphogenesis, capable of growing two-dimensional artificial organisms from a single seed cell. In this paper, we show that NCAs can be trained to respond to signals. Two types of signal are…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2024-01-30 James Stovold

Inspired by cellular growth and self-organization, Neural Cellular Automata (NCAs) have been capable of "growing" artificial cells into images, 3D structures, and even functional machines. NCAs are flexible and robust computational systems…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2022-05-16 Shyam Sudhakaran , Elias Najarro , Sebastian Risi

Neural Cellular Automata (NCA) have proven to be effective in a variety of fields, with numerous biologically inspired applications. One of the fields, in which NCAs perform well is the generation of textures, modelling global patterns from…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2025-11-25 Mirela-Magdalena Catrina , Ioana Cristina Plajer , Alexandra Baicoianu

Cellular Automata (CA) have long been foundational in simulating dynamical systems computationally. With recent innovations, this model class has been brought into the realm of deep learning by parameterizing the CA's update rule using an…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2023-11-29 Magnus Petersen

Neural Cellular Automata (NCAs) have been proven effective in simulating morphogenetic processes, the continuous construction of complex structures from very few starting cells. Recent developments in NCAs lie in the 2D domain, namely…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-07 Shyam Sudhakaran , Djordje Grbic , Siyan Li , Adam Katona , Elias Najarro , Claire Glanois , Sebastian Risi

Very recently, the Neural Cellular Automata (NCA) has been proposed to simulate the morphogenesis process with deep networks. NCA learns to grow an image starting from a fixed single pixel. In this work, we show that the neural network (NN)…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2021-03-03 Alejandro Hernandez Ruiz , Armand Vilalta , Francesc Moreno-Noguer

This study significantly advances multi-texture synthesis using Neural Cellular Automata (NCAs) by introducing a novel training methodology that enables robust self-regeneration of textures in damaged regions. This inherent healing…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Mirela-Magdalena Catrina , Ioana Cristina Plajer , Alexandra Băicoianu

Neural Cellular Automata (NCAs) are a promising new approach to model self-organizing processes, with potential applications in life science. However, their deterministic nature limits their ability to capture the stochasticity of…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-06-26 Salvatore Milite , Giulio Caravagna , Andrea Sottoriva

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

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

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

Most of the Neural Cellular Automata (NCAs) defined in the literature have a common theme: they are based on regular grids with a Moore neighborhood (one-hop neighbour). They do not take into account long-range connections and more complex…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-03 Léo Pio-Lopez , Benedikt Hartl , Michael Levin

Biological systems exhibit remarkable morphogenetic plasticity, where a single genome can encode various specialized cellular structures triggered by local chemical signals. In the domain of Deep Learning, Differentiable Neural Cellular…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2025-12-10 Ali Sakour

Neural Cellular Automata (NCA) are a powerful combination of machine learning and mechanistic modelling. We train NCA to learn complex dynamics from time series of images and PDE trajectories. Our method is designed to identify underlying…

Pattern Formation and Solitons · Physics 2024-04-23 Alex D. Richardson , Tibor Antal , Richard A. Blythe , Linus J. Schumacher

In this paper, we propose a novel approach to generate images (or other artworks) by using neural cellular automatas (NCAs). Rather than training NCAs based on single images one by one, we combined the idea with variational autoencoders…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-11-10 Mingxiang Chen , Zhecheng Wang

Neural Cellular Automata (NCA) models are trainable variations of traditional Cellular Automata (CA). Emergent motion in the patterns created by NCA has been successfully applied to synthesize dynamic textures. However, the conditions…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-01-30 Yitao Xu , Ehsan Pajouheshgar , Sabine Süsstrunk

Neural Cellular Automata (NCA) is a class of Cellular Automata where the update rule is parameterized by a neural network that can be trained using gradient descent. In this paper, we focus on NCA models used for texture synthesis, where…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-01-30 Ehsan Pajouheshgar , Yitao Xu , Sabine Süsstrunk

Neural cellular automata (Neural CA) are a recent framework used to model biological phenomena emerging from multicellular organisms. In these systems, artificial neural networks are used as update rules for cellular automata. Neural CA are…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2021-07-13 Alexandre Variengien , Stefano Nichele , Tom Glover , Sidney Pontes-Filho

Neural cellular automata represent an evolution of the traditional cellular automata model, enhanced by the integration of a deep learning-based transition function. This shift from a manual to a data-driven approach significantly increases…

Image and Video Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-03-26 Andrea Menta , Alberto Archetti , Matteo Matteucci
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