Poster
in
Workshop: From Cells to Societies: Collective Learning Across Scales
HyperNCA: Growing Developmental Networks with Neural Cellular Automata
Elias Najarro · Shyam Sudhakaran · Claire Glanois · Sebastian Risi
Keywords: [ hypernetworks ]
In contrast to deep reinforcement learning agents, biological neural networks are grown through a self-organized developmental process. Here we propose a new hypernetwork approach to grow artificial neural networks based on neural cellular automata (NCA). Inspired by self-organising systems and information-theoretic approaches to developmental biology, we show that our HyperNCA method can grow neural networks capable of solving common reinforcement learning tasks. Finally, we explore how the same approach can be used to build developmental metamorphosis networks capable of transforming their weights to solve variations of the initial RL task.