The paper introduces a closed‑loop framework using autotelic reinforcement learning to explore and manipulate complex systems, specifically Lenia, a continuous cellular automaton. An agent called CARL autonomously samples diverse goals and learns a goal‑conditioned policy that intervenes with minimal, local perturbations. CARL demonstrates three key abilities: discovering stable solitons more efficiently than heuristic baselines, steering existing solitons with few interventions, and enabling humans to guide solitons through maze environments in real time via high‑level commands. The agents generalize zero‑shot to out‑of‑distribution conditions, suggesting a path toward artificial experimentalist agents that can discover and control emergent phenomena.
arXiv:2606. 08405v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: While data-intensive deep reinforcement learning can optimize complex control policies, scientific discovery in physical systems fundamentally requires an interpretable chain of reasoning that connects physical evidence to structured control architectures.
arXiv:2505. 15998v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We present a curiosity-driven AI scientist method for discovering system-level dynamics in Flow-Lenia, a continuous cellular automaton (CA) with mass conservation and parameter localization.
arXiv:2609.17325v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Biological cells can be viewed as individual, interacting agents whose collective dynamics give rise to adaptive behaviour at multiple levels of organi...
arXiv:2512.08463v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study how privileged information about a physical system affects the discovery of high-performing policies when training a reinforcement learnin...
arXiv:2507.11482v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Artificial learning systems are graduating from passive learners to increasingly autonomous agents, lending pragmatic urgency to the question of wh...
arXiv:2607. 12861v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) holds great potential for robot swarms, but the black-box nature of neural policies complicates strategic analysis, limiting multi-robot applications.
arXiv:2609.07575v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This work introduces an alternative view of efficient exploration and studies its theoretical and empirical implications in the absence of extrinsic...
arXiv:2607. 07743v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Self-organization is an emergent property of life, driven by the collective behavior of individual components acting on local information.
arXiv:2603.28200v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Guiding collective motion in biological groups is a fundamental challenge in understanding social interaction rules. In this study, we propos...
arXiv:2609.15364v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Digital agents must often adapt to new environments whose interfaces, tools, and failure modes are not fully captured by pretrained models. We introduc...
arXiv:2609.40137v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present Game-Guided Skill Discovery (GGSD), a framework that uses self-play in games to discover motor skills that are directly playable by humans...
arXiv:2606. 23587v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Previous work has found a gap between the scale of neural networks that reliably learn Conway's Game of Life, and minimal networks capable of representing the classic cellular automaton with hard-coded parameter values.