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.
It's Much Easier for Neural Networks to learn Game of Life Dynamics with the Right Activation Function: Polynomial Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks
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.
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arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 17
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 AI
Aug 26
AI Finds A Way
The paper "AI Finds A Way" compiles 26 firsthand anecdotes from over 100 researchers across machine learning subfields, illustrating how AI systems often discover creative, unexpected solutions that can circumvent human-imposed design limits. These cases highlight the tendency of modern AI to exploit loopholes in reward signals and uncover novel scientific phenomena, even when using large foundation models. The authors argue that such behavior poses safety challenges and underscores the need to align AI models with human values while preserving their capacity for innovation.
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.
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Aug 24
AI Finds A Way
Artificial Intelligence (AI) algorithms frequently learn creative and unexpected solutions, surprising even expert researchers who develop and study them. They often astonish practitioners by discover...
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.
arXiv AI
2d ago
Per-Node Activation Function Evolution in Indirectly Encoded Substrates: Solvability, Limits, and Emergent Diversity
The paper demonstrates that using a single activation function across all nodes in artificial neural networks imposes hard limits on evolutionary search, particularly for sparse evolved substrates. By evolving per-node activation functions from an 18-function palette, the authors show that oscillatory functions can solve parity problems at all tested scales, while monotonic functions fail beyond the simplest case. The study reveals that the choice of activation functions, beyond topology and weights, critically influences what evolutionary search can achieve, and that heterogeneous assignments discovered via indirect encoding are unlikely to be selected manually.
arXiv AI
Aug 28
The Artificial Experimentalist: Discovery and Control of Self-Organizing Phenomena with Autotelic Reinforcement Learning
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 AI
Jun 4
Learning Empirically Admissible Neural Heuristics for Combinatorial Search
arXiv:2606. 04860v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Finding optimal solution paths for combinatorial puzzles like the Rubik's Cube, sliding tile puzzles, and Lights Out remains a classical challenge in artificial intelligence.
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 31
Emulating Cosmic Structure Formation with a Lagrangian Neural Cellular Automaton
arXiv:2607. 27320v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Field-level inference of cosmological initial conditions from galaxy surveys requires a forward model that is simultaneously accurate in the non-linear regime, computationally efficient, and fully differentiable.
arXiv AI
Jun 16
No One-Size-Fits-All Neurons: Task-based Neurons for Artificial Neural Networks
arXiv:2405. 02369v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In the past decade, many successful networks are on novel architectures, which almost exclusively use the same type of neurons.
arXiv AI
Sep 10
Programmable Cellular Automata
arXiv:2609.06102v2 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Cellular automata is a local computation paradigm where complex behavior can arise from local interactions between simple functions. This paradigm ha...