HN Explorer

Show HN: High-Res Neural Cellular Automata (cells2pixels.github.io)

208 points by esychology ↗ HN
Neural CAs model self-organizing pattern formation.

Now they can generate patterns at HD resolution in real-time, enabled by turning each CA cell into a Neural Field.

Try 3 demos: grow a pattern from a seed (and damage it, it heals), synthesize PBR textures that can regenerate, or create 3D textures like clouds.

20 comments

[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 39.3 ms ] thread
amelius
Why are the images always generated in the same orientation (upright)? Do the cells have awareness of what is "up"?
WhiteNoiz3
IIRC training starts with the initial state and the end state, and the end state is always oriented the same way. It would be interesting to see what would happen if the end state was rotated randomly though I suspect it wouldn't work so well.
WithinReason
You can make the centipede grow longer, which makes sense given how this works. Or grow a 2nd centipede for extra points.
jekude
The abstract implies that strictly local updates are a hinderance to high res, however i would have thought there would be an interesting way to get speed up gains from neighbor-only traffic on GPUs CAM-style. am i making that up?
embedding-shape
Really interesting demo, nicely done :) Would be fun if switching the "Target Image" when using the second brush mode in the Growing Demo didn't erase/reset the existing canvas, so we could "stamp" new things on top of other images. Small thing perhaps but I got sad when it disappeared when I wanted to merge a kitten on top of the chameleon but couldn't :(
esychology
That's not possible in the current demo but this sounds like an interesting feature to work on and add!
whilenot-dev
The automata just completely destroys the image if I draw too much over the stabilized image with the brush. 5 horizontal swipes are enough to destroy the kitty, is that to be expected?

EDIT: video here: https://imgur.com/a/ItZGd5X

mirekrusin
So the goal is to evaporate it with minimum number of shots?
hidelooktropic
For the unfamiliar, could someone explain what I'm looking at? The abstract was a little too concrete (heh) for me to follow.
WhitneyLand
At a glance it looks like it could be just iterative texture sampling.

The difference is when creating each pixel, there’s no coordinate to look up, instead it’s using only a set of rules like Conway’s game of life.

But the rules come from a neural network trained on the image, so… it’s kind of memorizing enough information to effectively do the same thing as texture sampling, but using only local information.

I’m sure I’m missing something about how it works or what makes it interesting…

oersted
To me, it is intriguing as a toy model for how cells are able to grow into complex tissue and organisms based only on local information, and how they are able to repair and recover harmed tissue.

Of course, this is as close to cells, as neurons from neural networks are to real neurons. And I have no idea what it could be applied to (inpainting/outpainting?), but it’s interesting as exploratory research.

esychology
Texture sampling retrieves pixels by coordinate, while NCA grows them from local rules with no global lookup. The weights are actually ~3× smaller than JPEG-compressed texture maps, so it's not just memorizing the image either. The more interesting part is that it's a dynamic process, you can damage the pattern while it forms and it repairs itself.
zcw100
I've always loved the original work and it's nice to see they're still working on it. I've always wondered if there was a way to connect this back to infrastructure rather than images. Something you could run on a cluster and if portions of it failed it would regenerate the system.

Like a bio inspired Kubernettes.....Bionettes.

moralestapia
@esychology this is phenomenal work, thank you so much for sharing it. I am working in a similar thing and might reach out about it soon.

Also, what's going on? Why would the community flag and kill this comment[1], from the creator itself. If you're jealous of what the guy built, take it elsewhere. HN will implode with that attitude.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48571171

_menelaus
Fascinating. A glimpse into the mathematics of life and living tissue. A toy example like this might herald self-healing machines, in the same way that the first perceptrons heralded Fable and nude deepfakes.
Akimsa3
That's really impressive i've been thinking that we have using technologies cause they were a breakthrough but we actual resources we can implement technollogy that was relegated time ago, like when implementing 3d there were many other until the one who was more consistent is how we visualize 3d today. Cause this looks pretty simillar to metaballs. An idea that is not longer that hard pursued but i just saw the similarity.