# Towards self-organized control: Using neural cellular automata to robustly control a cart-pole agent

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.15240 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.15240/

## Key facts

- Cited by 16 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 29 Jun 2021.

## Built on by (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [Attention-based Neural Cellular Automata](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.01233/) (2022)
- [ARC-NCA: Towards Developmental Solutions to the Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.08778/) (2025)
- [Neural Cellular Automata for ARC-AGI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.15746/) (2025)
- [Discovering Sensorimotor Agency in Cellular Automata using Diversity Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.10236/) (2024)
- [Neural cellular automata: applications to biology and beyond classical AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.11131/) (2025)
- [EngramNCA: a Neural Cellular Automaton Model of Memory Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.11855/) (2025)
- [Growing Steerable Neural Cellular Automata](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.10197/) (2023)
- [A Unified Substrate for Body-Brain Co-evolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12066/) (2022)
- [Latent Neural Cellular Automata for Resource-Efficient Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.15525/) (2024)
- [Collective control of modular soft robots via embodied Spiking Neural Cellular Automata](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02099/) (2022)
- [Capturing Emerging Complexity in Lenia](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.09378/) (2023)
- [On the Emergence of Syntax by Means of Local Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.17857/) (2026)
- [The Generalist Brain Module: Module Repetition in Neural Networks in Light of the Minicolumn Hypothesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.12473/) (2025)
- [Emergent Models: Intelligence from Tiny Substrates](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.14019/) (2026)
- [Reasoning with Neural Cellular Automata](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.36126/) (2026)
- [MetaLearnNCA: Few-Shot Offline Meta-Learning via Interacting Neural Cellular Automata](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.08479/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Neural cellular automata (Neural CA) are a recent framework used to model biological phenomena emerging from multicellular organisms. In these systems, artificial neural networks are used as update rules for cellular automata. Neural CA are end-to-end differentiable systems where the parameters of the neural network can be learned to achieve a particular task. In this work, we used neural CA to control a cart-pole agent. The observations of the environment are transmitted in input cells, while the values of output cells are used as a readout of the system. We trained the model using deep-Q learning, where the states of the output cells were used as the Q-value estimates to be optimized. We found that the computing abilities of the cellular automata were maintained over several hundreds of thousands of iterations, producing an emergent stable behavior in the environment it controls for thousands of steps. Moreover, the system demonstrated life-like phenomena such as a developmental phase, regeneration after damage, stability despite a noisy environment, and robustness to unseen disruption such as input deletion.