3 citations · 7 across the 9 of their papers we have counts for
11 papers
On Growth and Form, and Function: Reusable Regulatory Handles Control Phenotypic Variation
Benedikt Hartl, Milton L. Montero, Marcello Barylli +2
How phenotypic transformations are implemented by changes in underlying regulatory dynamics remains a central question in developmental biology. Inspired by D'Arcy Thompson's 1917…
The Artificial Experimentalist: Discovery and Control of Self-Organizing Phenomena with Autotelic Reinforcement Learning
Marko Cvjetko, Benedikt Hartl, Michael Levin +2
Existing methods for exploring cellular automata and other complex systems mostly operate in open loop: they set initial conditions, execute a full simulation, and observe the outc…
Emergent swimming strategies of a smart three-bead swimmer
Ruma Maity, Maximilian Huebl, Julian Lemmel +2
Low-Reynolds-number microswimmers have recently attracted much interest for their ubiquity in biology and their applications in biotechnology and medicine. However, a key obstacle…
Agnosiophobia in a virtual agent: behavioral and dynamical architecture in Lenia
Jesse Cool, Benedikt Hartl, Michael Levin +1
All embodied agents are fundamentally patterns in physiological or other excitable media, blurring the distinction between objects and processes. Emergent patterns with complex beh…
A Little Rank Goes a Long Way: Random Scaffolds with LoRA Adapters Are All You Need
Hananel Hazan, Yanbo Zhang, Benedikt Hartl +1
How many of a neural network's parameters actually encode task-specific information? We investigate this question with LottaLoRA, a training paradigm in which every backbone weight…
BraiNCA: brain-inspired neural cellular automata and applications to morphogenesis and motor control
Léo Pio-Lopez, Benedikt Hartl, Michael Levin
Most of the Neural Cellular Automata (NCAs) defined in the literature have a common theme: they are based on regular grids with a Moore neighborhood (one-hop neighbour). They do no…
Evolving Symbiosis, from Barricelli's Legacy to Collective Intelligence: a simulated and conceptual approach
James Ashford, Marko Cvjetko, Richard Löffler +6
This report documents the work of our group (named SymBa) at the ALICE 2026 workshop in Copenhagen. Inspired by the pioneering work by Nils Aall Barricelli on symbiogenesis of nume…
Remapping and navigation of an embedding space via error minimization: a fundamental organizational principle of cognition in natural and artificial systems
Benedikt Hartl, Léo Pio-Lopez, Chris Fields +1
The emerging field of diverse intelligence seeks an integrated view of problem-solving in agents of very different provenance, composition, and substrates. From subcellular chemica…
Neural cellular automata: applications to biology and beyond classical AI
Benedikt Hartl, Michael Levin, Léo Pio-Lopez
Neural Cellular Automata (NCA) represent a powerful framework for modeling biological self-organization, extending classical rule-based systems with trainable, differentiable (or e…
Heuristically Adaptive Diffusion-Model Evolutionary Strategy
Benedikt Hartl, Yanbo Zhang, Hananel Hazan +1
Diffusion Models represent a significant advancement in generative modeling, employing a dual-phase process that first degrades domain-specific information via Gaussian noise and r…
Diffusion Models are Evolutionary Algorithms
Yanbo Zhang, Benedikt Hartl, Hananel Hazan +1
In a convergence of machine learning and biology, we reveal that diffusion models are evolutionary algorithms. By considering evolution as a denoising process and reversed evolutio…