Search arXiv⌕ Search
Home/Archive/arXiv

arXiv · 2311.16123

Exploring Multiple Neighborhood Neural Cellular Automata (MNNCA) for Enhanced Texture Learning

Magnus Petersen
View original source ↗Read source document ↗Export metadata ↓

Abstract

Cellular Automata (CA) have long been foundational in simulating dynamical systems computationally. With recent innovations, this model class has been brought into the realm of deep learning by parameterizing the CA's update rule using an artificial neural network, termed Neural Cellular Automata (NCA). This allows NCAs to be trained via gradient descent, enabling them to evolve into specific shapes, generate textures, and mimic behaviors such as swarming. However, a limitation of traditional NCAs is their inability to exhibit sufficiently complex behaviors, restricting their potential in creative and modeling tasks. Our research explores enhancing the NCA framework by incorporating multiple neighborhoods and introducing structured noise for seed states. This approach is inspired by techniques that have historically amplified the expressiveness of classical continuous CA. All code and example videos are publicly available on https://github.com/MagnusPetersen/MNNCA.

Explore related subjects

cs.NEnlin.CG

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

Magnus Petersen. 2023-10-27. Exploring Multiple Neighborhood Neural Cellular Automata (MNNCA) for Enhanced Texture Learning. https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.16123

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

arXiv2026

Genetic Programming with Behaviour-based Niching for Learning Guided Local Search in Vehicle Routing Problems

Genetic Programming Guided Local Search (GPGLS) learns utility functions that guide local search for vehicle routing. Its evolving programs can have similar fitness while inducing different search behaviour, making fitness alone an incomplete basis for population diversity management. We propose GPGLS with Behaviour-based Niching (BN-GPGLS), which characterises programs through six operator-level descriptors collected during local search. A current-generation archive selects fitness-competitive, compact representatives from strata of a behaviour score. Fixed policies use archive parents continuously, whereas adaptive policies activate them using training-fitness and standardised behaviour-dispersion signals, optionally with a tree-size condition. We compare four behaviour-based variants with a no-archive GPGLS control and fitness-based niching over 30 seed-matched runs on generated 200-customer instances. BN-Adaptive achieves the best descriptive average rank on a separate 90-instance monitoring set; aggregate routing-cost differences are small. All five archive policies produce lower final-population median tree sizes than the GPGLS control, with paired Wilcoxon comparisons remaining significant after Holm adjustment. These results identify useful solution-quality and program-size trade-offs within the evaluated setting, without attributing the size reductions to behaviour representation alone.

cs.NE↗
arXiv2026

DCL-GPGLS: Dynamic Curriculum Learning for Genetic Programming Guided Local Search in Large-Scale Vehicle Routing

Genetic Programming Guided Local Search (GPGLS) uses genetic programming to evolve utility functions for guided local search in large-scale vehicle routing problems (LSVRPs). Evaluating every GP individual on every training instance at every generation is expensive, so GPGLS is usually trained on small instance batches. Existing curriculum-based GPGLS orders these batches mainly by instance size. Adaptive Curriculum Learning GPGLS (ACL-GPGLS) improves training efficiency by adapting when the search moves between fixed curriculum stages, but the instance difficulty order remains predefined. We propose DCL-GPGLS, which estimates the difficulty of each training instance from the current population's solution quality and updates the estimates during evolution. Each generation then receives a batch near a scheduled difficulty level, with a correction that limits repeated selection of the same instances. Experiments on a fixed training-test split of the CVRPLIB X set show that DCL-GPGLS achieves the best observed average rank and mean test cost among six training policies. It obtains the lowest mean cost on 36 of 65 unseen test instances and is significantly better than the static feedback-derived curriculum, matched in total evaluator calls, on 6 instances, with no significant difference on the remaining 59.

cs.NE↗
arXiv2026

Meta-Representational Predictive Coding: Neuroscience-Informed Self-Supervised Learning

Self-supervised learning has become an important paradigm in the domains of machine intelligence and computational neuroscience. Nevertheless, current work on self-supervised learning (SSL) relies on biologically implausible credit assignment, i.e., backpropagation of errors, and feedforward inference, i.e., a sequential, non-parallel flow of information. Predictive coding (PC) offers a biologically plausible means to avoid backprop-specific limitations. However, unsupervised PC requires learning a generative model of raw input, which entails predicting high dimensional input; on the other hand, supervised PC learns a mapping between inputs to target labels and thus requires human annotation and incurs the drawbacks of supervised learning. In this work, we present a neuroscience-informed SSL model based on PC and active perception that we call meta-representational predictive coding (MPC). MPC sidesteps the need for a generative model of sensory input by learning to predict representations of data across parallel streams, resulting in an encoder-only learning-and-inference scheme.

cs.NE↗