arXiv Machine Learning

Emergent Models: Intelligence from Tiny Substrates

arXiv:2608. 14019v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Emergent Models (EMs) are a machine learning paradigm based on simple yet open-ended substrates, such as cellular automata, in which modeling is treated not as the learning of a closed-form input-output map but as the emergence, within simple dynamical systems, of computational behaviors that solve external tasks.

arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 27

Emergent Abilities in Large Language Models: A Survey

Emergent Abilities in Large Language Models: A Survey reviews how scaling LLMs leads to previously unseen capabilities such as advanced reasoning, in-context learning, coding, and problem-solving. The paper critically examines definitions, inconsistencies, and the conditions that foster these abilities, including scaling laws, task complexity, pre‑training loss, quantization, and prompting strategies. It also discusses the extension to Large Reasoning Models and highlights safety concerns like deception, manipulation, and reward hacking, calling for improved evaluation and governance.

By Leonardo Berti, Flavio Giorgi, Gjergji Kasneci
arXiv AI
Jul 22

Intelligence from Learnable Novelty

arXiv:2607. 18433v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Intelligence appears under different names in different fields: as data compression in statistics and machine learning, as universal computation in dynamical systems, and as adaptive behavior in agents.

By Yanbo Zhang, Michael Levin
arXiv AI
Jul 10

Architecture Generalization with MetaNCA

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.

By Meet Barot, Daniel Berenberg, Sina Khajehabdollahi
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 31

LM-GRASP: Instance-Specific Language Models for Combinatorial Construction via Online Imitation Learning

arXiv:2607. 28135v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Machine learning for combinatorial optimization typically relies on neural constructors trained via reinforcement learning on large offline datasets for a fixed problem class-incurring high pretraining costs and generalizing poorly outside the training distribution.

By Mohand Mezmaz, Gr\'egoire Danoy
arXiv AI
Jun 26

The Red Queen G\"odel Machine: Co-Evolving Agents and Their Evaluators

arXiv:2606. 26294v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Self-improving agents are state-of-the-art (SOTA) on agentic coding benchmarks and have recently been extended to general domains.

By Alex Iacob, Andrej Jovanovi\'c, William F. Shen, Daniel Burkhardt, Meghdad Kurmanji, Nurbek Tastan, Lorenzo Sani, Niccol\`o Alberto Elia Venanzi, Ambroise Odonnat, Zeyu Cao, Bill Marino, Xinchi Qiu, Nicholas D. Lane
arXiv AI
Sep 2

Flawed in Nature, Perfect through Evolution

arXiv:2609.00129v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The performance of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) models degrades when the problem they were trained on drifts. This is a nea...

By J. M. Diederik Kruijssen (Allora Foundation)
arXiv AI
Sep 21

Neural Cellular Automata Learn General Features in their Hidden Channels

Neural Cellular Automata (NCAs) are shown to learn general, scale‑invariant topological primitives in their hidden channels, which can be transferred from a teacher to a student model for few‑shot learning. The study introduces a transfer‑learning mechanism that injects pretrained hidden states into a student, improving early optimization and outperforming recurrent and feed‑forward baselines on MNIST benchmarks with only ~9,800 parameters. Mechanistic analysis reveals that hidden channels decouple feature extraction from classification, converging to mutually orthogonal states that absorb morphological complexity.

By Etienne Guichard, Stefano Nichele
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 25

Online Task Adaptation via Self-Organisation

The paper proposes a method for task adaptation that eliminates the need for gradient computation during adaptation. Using a Neural Cellular Automaton, the authors train recurrent dynamics and memory read/write operations via backpropagation, then fix the slow model parameters. Online adaptation is achieved solely through local memory updates driven by prediction errors, enabling significant performance gains on new classification tasks with a single support set pass.

By Krsto Prorokovi\'c