The paper investigates a cellular‑automata substrate where each pixel hosts a tiny neural network that senses its neighbors and survives only by self‑replication with mutated weights. Starting from a few founders, the system evolves into a spatially organized ecosystem of competing species, and the authors introduce coarse‑grained metrics to quantify phenotypic and genotypic diversity at two scales. Experiments show that high phenotypic diversity reduces genotypic diversity and vice versa, and that full‑genome hash colouring reveals lineage structures missed by random‑weight probes.
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.
The study investigates how phenotypic changes can be encoded as low‑dimensional modulations of a self‑organizing developmental system, using neural cellular automata (NCAs) as a model. By applying low‑rank adaptation (LoRA) to pretrained NCAs, the authors show that simple rank‑one adjustments can control horizontal and vertical scaling of a 2D emoji phenotype, and that these adaptations generalize across diverse phenotypes sharing the same regulatory scaffold. Analysis of thousands of phenotype‑specific NCA adapters reveals latent low‑dimensional directions that govern scaling, style, and symmetrical fission, offering a computational realization of D’Arcy Thompson’s grid transformations in a minimal cybernetic tissue.
arXiv:2608. 06659v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper shows that latent-space predictive pretraining can provide a scalable route to foundation models for spatial transcriptomics.
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:2608. 09385v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Generative AI models are primarily designed to imitate the data distribution, an objective that neither corrects diversity lost by a learned generator nor defines how generation should extend beyond the diversity of the data itself.
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:2609.17067v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Indirectly encoded neural networks can assign different activation functions to individual nodes, but the right functions are rarely known in advance...
arXiv:2606. 08493v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: \textit{Tissue graph counterfactuals} ask how a cell's expression would change under altered spatial neighbor contexts.
The paper introduces Autopoietic Game Theory, a computational model where social interactions, replication mechanisms, and computational costs co-evolve within a substrate of randomly initialized Z80 machine code programs. By embedding a social dilemma directly into the physics of computation, the authors demonstrate that scarcity of resources can make defection self-limiting, leading to the emergence of self-replicating, cooperative strategies. Empirical results show evolved programs suppress stealing, and spatial assortment enhances structural complexity and task performance, while the framework can also incorporate exogenous pressures such as math tasks tied to computation budgets.
The paper investigates whether artificial evolution can replicate biological neuromodulation and diverse neuron types in indirectly encoded substrates. Experiments show that neuromodulation alone cannot overcome a 75% performance ceiling on parity tasks, but combining neuromodulation with per‑task activation function selection allows a single evolving genotype to achieve 100% success across five tasks. This demonstrates that both neuromodulation and evolvable computational primitives are necessary for multi‑behavioral open‑ended evolution.
arXiv:2605. 14998v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: From subcellular structures to entire organisms, many natural systems generate complex organisation through self-organisation: local interactions that collectively give rise to global structure without any blueprint of the outcome.
arXiv:2602. 15253v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Neural scaling laws -- power-law relationships between loss, model size, and data -- have been extensively documented for language and vision transformers, yet their existence in single-cell genomics remains largely unexplored.