Discovering and Controlling Diverse Self-Organized Patterns in Cellular Automata Using Autotelic Reinforcement Learning

developmentalsystems.org/rl-for-ca/

Authors: @mcvjetko.bsky.social (attending), @hamongautier.bsky.social and @pyoudeyer.bsky.social

Expedition & Expansion: Leveraging Semantic Representations for Goal-Directed Exploration in Continuous Cellular Automata

developmentalsystems.org/expedition_e...

S. Khajehabdollahi and @mcvjetko.bsky.social (both attending), @hamongautier.bsky.social @ccolas.bsky.social @pyoudeyer.bsky.social

Exploring Flow-Lenia Universes with a Curiosity-driven AI Scientist: Discovering Diverse Ecosystem Dynamics

developmentalsystems.org/Exploring-Fl...

Authors: @thomas-michel.bsky.social and @mcvjetko.bsky.social (both attending), @hamongautier.bsky.social and @pyoudeyer.bsky.social

3 papers from @flowersinria team are presented this week at the @alife2025.bsky.social , leveraging curiosity-driven AI to explore complex behaviors in #Lenia

All first authors are attending the conference if you want to discuss with them.

Link to interactive websites, papers and code below:

On the same topic:
How many people are needed for starting a Revolution?
by Mehdi Moussaïd from Max Planck Institute.
The video is in French by auto-translated subtitles work quite well on youtube.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-1q...

Here is the talk outline:

Extended Flow-Lenia paper is out in the ALife journal, with more experiments and insights! See 🧵 from 1st-author
@eplantec.bsky.social for a summary.

For a full overview of our research in Artificial Life, here is a talk I gave at the Demeco workshop at EPFL
:
youtube.com/watch?v=YYFr...

With an interactive website to explore these universes: developmentalsystems.org/Exploring-Fl...

Le potentiel artistique de (Flow-)Lenia en particulier, et de la simulation de systèmes complexes en général, est considérable. Une belle démonstration actuellement au Jeu de Paume à Paris, par Samuel Bianchini et collègues.

Et notre dernier papier, Flow-Lenia Universes :
arxiv.org/abs/2505.15998

The #Demeco workshop has kicked off with a great introductory talk from @bertchakovsky.bsky.social on #Lenia and variants.
I'll present recent progress from Inria Flowers Tuesday at 10:20
www.dem.eco

Published my WebGPU Particle Life simulation online! Obviously it requires WebGPU support, and it's quite resource-demanding, so I've set the particle count to 64k for now. Also it probably doesn't work on mobile; will fix later.

Enjoy: lisyarus.github.io/webgpu/parti...

Cool videos from our new paper applying Diversity Search to Flow-Lenia to explore a vast space of eco-evolutionary dynamics. Preprint paper, dataset and online visualization tool soon available, stay tuned!
I'll present this and other Lenia experiments on May 27 at www.dem.eco
#ALife #Open-endedness

Very happy that our paper received both the EvoApps best paper and the EvoStar best student paper! Congrats team!!

Emergent Kin Selection of Altruistic Feeding via Non-Episodic Neuroevolution
arxiv.org/abs/2411.10536

Our paper "When LLMs Play the Telephone Game: Cumulative Changes and Attractors in Iterated Cultural Transmissions"is presented at ICLR by @gaiamolinaro.bsky.social (below).
Summary of method and findings, in this X thread by Jeremy Perez: x.com/Jeremy__Pere...

Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2407.04503

If you want to follow all research from the Flowers group, here is a starter pack:
bsky.app/starter-pack...

For the record, Max Taylor-Davies was able to complete this full project, from idea to paper, in only a 3-month research visit at the Flowers AI and CogSci Lab at Inria. He's nominated for the best student paper award. Max is not yet on Bluesky, here is his X account:
x.com/MaxTaylorDav...

As well as serving as a methodological demonstration for how kin selection and inclusive fitness can be studied using neuroevolution of simulated agents, we believe that our results may have some broader theoretical implications, as explained in this snapshot of the paper discussion:

We show that this is sufficient to evolve altruistic feeding behavior, especially towards kins: hence emergent kin selection

In this new paper, we simply add to this previous model:
- An additional action to feed another agent
- An additional observation indicating if another agent is an offspring
- An infancy period where an agent has reduced abilities

In this paper, we leverage the Non-Episodic Neuro-Evolution framework we developed with @hamongautier.bsky.social and Eleni Nisioti to study eco-evolutionary feedbacks. Illustrated in the fig. below, summarized in this thread: x.com/ClemMoulinFr... , see this paper: dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1...

Max Taylor-Davies will present our new paper at the Evostar conference on Thursday:

Emergent Kin Selection of Altruistic Feeding via Non-Episodic Neuroevolution
arxiv.org/abs/2411.10536

A joint work with @hamongautier.bsky.social , Timothé Boulet and myself.

A quick summary below: