5 ms·
Authors here. If you have any questions we'll do our best to answer them! Glad to see people find our work interesting thus far. We also encourage anyone inter
by eyvindn 6y ago
Authors here. If you have any questions we'll do our best to answer them! Glad to see people find our work interesting thus far.
We also encourage anyone interested to play with the linked Google Colabs [1][2] and read the other articles in the Distill thread. In the Colabs you'll find a bunch more pre-trained textures as well as a workflow to train on your own images, plus some of the scaffolding to recreate figures.
[1] https://colab.sandbox.google.com/github/google-research/self-organising-systems/blob/master/notebooks/texture_nca_tf2.ipynb https://colab.sandbox.google.com/github/google-research/self...
[2] https://colab.sandbox.google.com/github/google-research/self-organising-systems/blob/master/notebooks/texture_nca_pytorch.ipynb https://colab.sandbox.google.com/github/google-research/self...
- zitterbewegung 6y agoThe textures remind me of the beginning of once in a lifetime by talking heads. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5IsSpAOD6K8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5IsSpAOD6K8
- alanbernstein 6y agoLooks similar to the Gray-Scott model. https://mrob.com/pub/comp/xmorphia/ https://mrob.com/pub/comp/xmorphia/
- layer8 6y agoHow large is the state space for each cell? Full 8-bit RGB (= 24 bits)?
- zzznah 6y agoEach cell has 12 8-bit channels, including rgb, so it is 96 bits.
- yorwba 6y agoThe article says "our NCA model contains 16 channels. The first three are visible RGB channels and the rest we treat as latent channels which are visible to adjacent cells during update steps, but excluded from loss functions."
- eyvindn 6y agoThanks for noticing. This is a typo stemming from early experiments. We started out with 16 channels, but switched to 12 channels of state when this worked just as well. I've submitted a correction.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- eyvindn 6y agoEDIT: Alex replied below. For more details on quantisation see footnotes in our seminal work [1] [1] https://distill.pub/2020/growing-ca/ https://distill.pub/2020/growing-ca/
- phreeza 6y agoIs it common to describe ones own work as seminal?
- munificent 6y agoIn typical parlance today, "seminal" means "from which a bunch of important things have sprung" but I think there is an older definition which is simply "first".
- eyvindn 6y agoApologies, not my intention. I was also under the impression seminal could be used to mean ”first” in the succession of our works and this is what I had intended to communicate.
- colah3 6y agoI don't think English is the author's first language.
- DemocracyFTW 6y agoIt's their seminal language XD As a non-native but long-term speaker of English, I understand "seminal" as in "their seminal work" as "groundbreaking" (and better to be avoided when referring to one's own work). But slips of the pen are inevitable, so no harm done.
- toss1 6y agoWow!! Really impressive work - in seconds, I see so much both richness of ideas and potential! And, as is so often the case, the really interesting work happens on the intersection of two fields - neural nets and cellular automata here. I've got tons of new reading to do now! Any plans to extend it to generation in 3D space?
- eyvindn 6y agoThere's some recent work that involves NCAs in a 3D setting by Horibe et. al [1] and tweet [2]. Other work by Risi and collaborators is definitely worth checking out as well. [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2102.02579 https://arxiv.org/abs/2102.02579 [2] https://twitter.com/risi1979/status/1358018266824912897 https://twitter.com/risi1979/status/1358018266824912897
- toss1 6y agonice - thanks!
- blacksmith_tb 6y agoVery interesting work. The bottom of the article has links[1] to the GH repo, but I take it that it's a private repo? 1: https://github.com/distillpub/post--selforg-textures https://github.com/distillpub/post--selforg-textures
- jderick 6y agoWhere do the original textures come from?
- eyvindn 6y agoThe texture template images come from [1], a collection of textures categorised by "description". [1] https://www.robots.ox.ac.uk/~vgg/data/dtd/ https://www.robots.ox.ac.uk/~vgg/data/dtd/
- JackFr 6y agoThis is the first I've ever read about neural cellular automata. I think I was able to pick up the broad strokes from context, but is there a good introductory resource for neural cellular automata?
- ciaranby 6y agoGreat post, thanks! I saw Growing Neural Cellular Automata document you describe a strategy to get the model to learn attractor dynamics. I was kind of reminded of Deep Equilibrium Models (https://arxiv.org/abs/1909.01377 https://arxiv.org/abs/1909.01377). Is there a relationship between these models and do you think these root finding and implicit differentiation techniques could be used to train Cellular Automata too?
- mysterEFrank 6y agoI love all you guys' work. Keep it up.
- teenbear 6y agoThanks for the write up! Just a note: at least in the pytorch collab there are missing includes (numpy and the imread function)
- eyvindn 6y agoThe second cell looks a section title ("Imports and Notebook Utilities"), but contains the definitions of these functions and the imports. Run this cell and I suspect things should work.
- jsilence 6y agoQuestion? Yes: Why do I love you so much? I don't even know you!