arXiv:2608. 06871v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Complex systems, core objects of study in artificial life, model diverse phenomena through nonlinear, feedback-driven interactions that produce emergent behavior, with applications from population dynamics and biology to economic policy and strategic decision-making.
By Yingtao Tian
arXiv:2606. 13662v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLM-based agents have shown increasing potential in automating scientific discovery.
By Amy Xin, Jiening Siow, Junjie Wang, Zijun Yao, Fanjin Zhang, Jian Song, Lei Hou, Juanzi Li
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.
By Marko Cvjetko, Benedikt Hartl, Michael Levin, Cl\'ement Moulin-Frier, Pierre-Yves Oudeyer
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.
By Sanyam Jain, Felix Simon Reimers, Stefano Nichele
The paper introduces PACEvolve, a framework that improves self‑evolving agents powered by Large Language Models by addressing their tendency to become trapped in local contexts and repeat flawed hypotheses. It does so through three techniques: Hierarchical Context Management to prune memory, Momentum‑Based Backtracking to escape local minima, and a self‑adaptive Collaborative Evolution policy to balance refinement and knowledge transfer. These methods enable the agents to maintain a global view of search momentum and achieve state‑of‑the‑art results on complex evolutionary benchmarks.
By Minghao Yan, Bo Peng, Benjamin Coleman, Ziqi Chen, Zhouhang Xie, Shuo Chen, Zhankui He, Noveen Sachdeva, Isabella Ye, Weili Wang, Chi Wang, Ed H. Chi, Fernando Pereira, Wang-Cheng Kang, Derek Zhiyuan Cheng, Beidou Wang
CORAL is a framework that enables autonomous multi‑agent evolution for open‑ended discovery, replacing rigid heuristics with long‑running agents that explore, reflect, and collaborate via shared memory and asynchronous execution. It incorporates safeguards such as isolated workspaces, evaluator separation, and resource management. In experiments across mathematical, algorithmic, and systems optimization tasks, CORAL achieves 3–10 times higher improvement rates with fewer evaluations than traditional evolutionary baselines, and improves the best known score on Anthropic’s kernel engineering task from 1363 to 1103 cycles.
By Ao Qu, Han Zheng, Zijian Zhou, Yihao Yan, Yihong Tang, Shao Yong Ong, Fenglu Hong, Kaichen Zhou, Chonghe Jiang, Minwei Kong, Jiacheng Zhu, Xuan Jiang, Sirui Li, Cathy Wu, Bryan Kian Hsiang Low, Jinhua Zhao, Paul Pu Liang