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: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.
By Giacomo Bocchese, Nicola Giacobbo, Etienne Guichard, James Wiles, Akshaj Devireddy
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.
By Aaron Dharna, Cong Lu, Ryan Sullivan, Joel Lehman, Victoria Krakovna, Jeff Clune
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
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...
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