# Empowered Neural Cellular Automata

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.06771 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.06771/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 8 of its 43 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Apr 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [Diversity is All You Need: Learning Skills without a Reward Function](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.06070/) (2018)
- [Empowerment -- an Introduction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1310.1863/) (2013)
- [CIC: Contrastive Intrinsic Control for Unsupervised Skill Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.00161/) (2022)
- [Lenia - Biology of Artificial Life](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.05433/) (2018)
- [Growing 3D Artefacts and Functional Machines with Neural Cellular Automata](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.08737/) (2021)
- [Lenia and Expanded Universe](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.03742/) (2020)
- [Learning to Generate 3D Shapes with Generative Cellular Automata](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.04130/) (2021)
- [Regenerating Soft Robots through Neural Cellular Automata](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.02579/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [EngramNCA: a Neural Cellular Automaton Model of Memory Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.11855/) (2025)
- [Selection for short-term empowerment accelerates the evolution of homeostatic neural cellular automata](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.15220/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Information-theoretic fitness functions are becoming increasingly popular to produce generally useful, task-independent behaviors. One such universal function, dubbed empowerment, measures the amount of control an agent exerts on its environment via its sensorimotor system. Specifically, empowerment attempts to maximize the mutual information between an agent's actions and its received sensor states at a later point in time. Traditionally, empowerment has been applied to a conventional sensorimotor apparatus, such as a robot. Here, we expand the approach to a distributed, multi-agent sensorimotor system embodied by a neural cellular automaton (NCA). We show that the addition of empowerment as a secondary objective in the evolution of NCA to perform the task of morphogenesis, growing and maintaining a pre-specified shape, results in higher fitness compared to evolving for morphogenesis alone. Results suggest there may be a synergistic relationship between morphogenesis and empowerment. That is, indirectly selecting for coordination between neighboring cells over the duration of development is beneficial to the developmental process itself. Such a finding may have applications in developmental biology by providing potential mechanisms of communication between cells during growth from a single cell to a multicellular, target morphology. Source code for the experiments in this paper can be found at: urlhttps://github.com/caitlingrasso/empowered-nca.