arXiv AI By Nam H. Le, Douglas Blackiston, Michael Levin, Josh Bongard

Toward Controlling Biology with Language:Offline Learning of Prompt-Conditioned Interventions for Cells, Organoids, and Biobots

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The paper demonstrates that a natural-language interface can be trained offline to control a xenobot—a synthetic multicellular construct—by using a vision‑language model to judge whether archived intervention outcomes match language descriptions. By treating existing intervention–outcome data as a fixed dataset, the authors train a language‑to‑intervention mapping without new experiments, achieving 80% accuracy on held‑out data compared to a 66.7% baseline. This approach shows that language‑driven control of living systems can be learned purely from archival data and automated visual assessment.

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