arXiv AI By Etienne Guichard, Stefano Nichele

Neural Cellular Automata Learn General Features in their Hidden Channels

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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.

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