arXiv:2512.08360cs.NEcs.AI2025-12

用局部规则让神经元自动长出不同数字,仅靠一个种子和类别信号。

Conditional Morphogenesis: Emergent Generation of Structural Digits via Neural Cellular Automata

  • 通过空间广播的类别向量控制局部规则,生成不同数字结构。
  • 从单个像素出发,成功生成10类数字拓扑,收敛稳定。
  • 模拟生物发育机制,适合研究可解释性生成模型的人看。

生物系统具有惊人的形态发生可塑性,单一基因组可在局部化学信号触发下编码多种特化细胞结构。在深度学习领域,可微分神经细胞自动机(NCA)已成为模拟此类自组织行为的新范式。然而,现有NCA研究主要集中在连续纹理合成或单目标恢复,对类别条件下的结构生成仍缺乏探索。本文提出一种新型条件神经细胞自动机(c-NCA),能够从单一通用种子出发,仅依赖空间广播的类别向量,生长出不同的拓扑结构——具体为MNIST数字。与依赖全局感受野的传统生成模型(如GAN、VAE)不同,本模型强制局部性与平移等变性。实验表明,通过向细胞感知场注入独热编码条件,一套局部规则即可打破对称性,自我组装成10个不同的几何吸引子。结果证明,该模型能稳定收敛,从单像素开始正确生成数字拓扑,具备类似生物系统的鲁棒性。本工作弥合了纹理型NCA与结构性模式形成之间的鸿沟,为条件生成提供了一种轻量、生物合理的替代方案。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Biological systems exhibit remarkable morphogenetic plasticity, where a single genome can encode various specialized cellular structures triggered by local chemical signals. In the domain of Deep Learning, Differentiable Neural Cellular Automata (NCA) have emerged as a paradigm to mimic this self-organization. However, existing NCA research has predominantly focused on continuous texture synthesis or single-target object recovery, leaving the challenge of class-conditional structural generation largely unexplored. In this work, we propose a novel Conditional Neural Cellular Automata (c-NCA) architecture capable of growing distinct topological structures - specifically MNIST digits - from a single generic seed, guided solely by a spatially broadcasted class vector. Unlike traditional generative models (e.g., GANs, VAEs) that rely on global reception fields, our model enforces strict locality and translation equivariance. We demonstrate that by injecting a one-hot condition into the cellular perception field, a single set of local rules can learn to break symmetry and self-assemble into ten distinct geometric attractors. Experimental results show that our c-NCA achieves stable convergence, correctly forming digit topologies from a single pixel, and exhibits robustness characteristic of biological systems. This work bridges the gap between texture-based NCAs and structural pattern formation, offering a lightweight, biologically plausible alternative for conditional generation.

神经自动机结构生成条件生成

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