Cellular automata and their differentiable counterparts, Neural Cellular Automata (NCA), are highly expressive and capable of surprisingly complex behaviors. This paper explores how NCAs perform when applied to tasks requiring precise transformations and few-shot generalization, using the Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus for Artificial General Intelligence (ARC-AGI) as a domain that challenges their capabilities in ways not previously explored. Specifically, this paper uses gradient-based training to learn iterative update rules that transform input grids into their outputs from the training examples and then applies them to the test inputs. Results suggest that gradient-trained NCA models are a promising and efficient approach to a range of abstract grid-based tasks from ARC. Along with discussing the impacts of various design modifications and training constraints, this work examines the behavior and properties of NCAs applied to ARC to give insights for broader applications of self-organizing systems.

PDF, Arxiv

To Appear In Proceedings of the 2025 Artificial Life Conference, October 2025.

@inproceedings{xu:alife25, title={Neural Cellular Automata for ARC-AGI}, author={Kevin Xu and Risto Miikkulainen}, booktitle={Proceedings of the 2025 Artificial Life Conference}, month={October}, url="http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/ai-lab?xu:alife25", year={2025} }

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