A curated list of anything related to Neural Cellular Automata (NCA) research, frameworks and applications.
NCA are a new type of neural architecture, marrying cellular automata and neural networks to create memory-efficient, robust models. Mostly, NCAs are applied in image segmentation, classification and generation. However, there are also works that use NCAs for reinforcement learning or generation of three-dimensional structures. This list is a curated collection of research papers and code repositories, presenting ideas and applications for NCA.
Scope: Other types of self-organizing systems, traditional cellular automata, other deep learning techiques are not covered, unless they utilize a cellular automaton with a learned rule in their computation. Review papers are not listed here, unless they are reviews of Neural Cellular Automata in particular (no reviews of, e.g., self-organizing systems in general that mention NCA).
You are welcome to contribute if you've found other NCA papers, code repositories or resources that you like to share.
Papers presenting theoretical and methodological contributions to NCA research, ordered by publication year.
Works that study NCAs applied to 2D or 3D lattices.
- Growing Neural Cellular Automata, Mordvintsev et al. 2020
- Self-classifying MNIST Digits, Randazzo et al. 2020
- Image Generation With Neural Cellular Automata, Chen & Wang 2020
- Predicting Geographic Information with Neural Cellular Automata, Chen et al. 2020
- Image segmentation via Cellular Automata, Sandler et al. 2020
- Self-organizing Textures, Niklasson et al. 2021
- Growing 3D Artefacts and Functional Machines with Neural Cellular Automata, Sudhakaran et al. 2021
- Adversarial Reprogramming of Neural Cellular Automata, Randazzo et al. 2021
- Generative Adversarial Neural Cellular Automata, Otte et al. 2021
- Physical Neural Cellular Automata for 2D Shape Classification, Walker et al. 2022
- Goal-Guided Neural Cellular Automata: Learning to Control Self-organizing Systems, Sudhakaran et al. 2022
- Variational Neural Cellular Automata, Palm et al. 2022
- Empowered Neural Cellular Automata, Grasso & Bongard 2022
- Attention-based Neural Cellular Automata, Tasfaldet et al. 2022
- HyperNCA: Growing Developmental Networks with NCA, Najarro et al. 2022
- Med-NCA, Robust and Lightweight Segmentation with Neural Cellular Automata, Kalkhof et al. 2023
- M3D-NCA: Robust 3D Segmentation with Built-in Quality Control, Kalkhof & Mukhopadhyay 2023
- Growing Steerable Neural Cellular Automata, Randazzo et al. 2023
- NCA-Morph: Medical Image Registration with Neural Cellular Automata, Ranem et al. 2024
- Unsupervised Training of Neural Cellular Automata on Edge Devices, Kalkhof et al. 2024
- Localized Data Representation with NCA-Based Autoencoders, Ihm et al. 2024
- Evolving Hierarchical Neural Cellular Automata, Bielawski et al. 2024
- Skin lesion segmentation via Neural Cellular Automata, Yue et al. 2024
- An Organism Starts with a Single Pix-Cell: A Neural Cellular Diffusion for High-Resolution Image Synthesis, Elbatel et al. 2024
- Deep learning with photonic neural cellular automata, Li et al. 2024
- Neural Cellular Automata for Lightweight, Robust and Explainable Classification of White Blood Cell Images, Deutges et al. 2024
- eNCApsulate: Neural Cellular Automata for Precision Diagnosis on Capsule Endoscopes, Krumb & Mukhopadhyay 2025
- NCAdapt: Dynamic Adaptation with Domain-Specific Neural Cellular Automata for Continual Hippocampus Segmentation, Ranem & Mukhopadhyay 2025
- Unraveling Neural Cellular Automata for Lightweight Image Compression, Falcao et al. 2025
- MED-NCA: Bio-inspired medical image segmentation, Kalkhof et al. 2025
- Differentiable Logic Cellular Automata, Miotti et al. 2025
- Parameter-efficient diffusion with neural cellular automata, Kalkhof et al. 2025
- A Path to Universal Neural Cellular Automata, Bêna et al. 2025
- ARC-NCA: Towards Developmental Solutions to the Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus, Guichard et al. 2025
- Neural Cellular Automata for ARC-AGI, Xu and Miikkulainen 2025
- Equitable Federated Learning with NCA, Lemke et al. 2025
Works that study Graph Neural Cellular Automata.
- Learning Graph Cellular Automata, Grattarola et al. 2021
- Training Topology With Graph Neural Cellular Automata, Dwyer et al. 2023
- Physics-Informed Graph Neural Cellular Automata: an Application to Compartmental Modelling, Navarin et al. 2024
- E(n)-equivariant Graph Neural Cellular Automata, Gala et al. 2025
None so far
Tabular overview of research papers on NCA since 2020, ordered by publication year.
| Paper URL | Year | Downstream Task | Dataset(s) | Code | Model |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Paper | 2020 | Grow from seed | Emojis | tensorflow, torch | NCA |
| Paper | 2020 | Classification | MNIST Digits | tensorflow | NCA |
| Paper | 2020 | Generation | Emojis, MNIST, CelebA | torch | NCA + VAE |
| Paper | 2020 | Traffic Prediction | Maps+Traffic overlay (custom) | torch | Multi-layer NCA |
| Paper | 2020 | Image Segmentation | Oxford cats & dogs | N/A | NCA with Gate |
| Paper | 2021 | Texture Generation | Dataset | torch, tensorflow | NCA |
| Paper | 2021 | 3D Structure Gen. | Minecraft Structures | torch | Multi-layer 3D NCA |
| Paper | 2021 | Classification, Reprogramming | MNIST | tensorflow | NCA |
| Paper | 2021 | Generation | Emojis | tensorflow/keras | NCA + GAN |
| Paper | 2022 | Shape self-classification on µC H/W | Digits (custom, but simple) | N/A | NCA |
| Paper | 2022 | Control of self-organization | Emojis | torch | NCA |
| Paper | 2022 | Gen. Modelling | Emojis, CelebA | torch | NCA + VAE |
| Paper | 2022 | Grow from seed | Custom shapes | numpy | NCA trained with information-theoretic fitness function and age-fitness pareto optimization |
| Paper | 2022 | Classification | Tiny ImageNet, MNIST, FashionMNIST, CelebA | torch | ViT + NCA (ViTCA) |
| Paper | 2022 | Generating policy networks for reinforcement learning | torch | 3D NCA | |
| Paper | 2023 | MRI Segmentation on Raspberry Pi | Decathlon (Hippocampus & Prostate), ISBI 2013 challenge | torch | Multi-scale NCA |
| Paper | 2023 | MRI Segmentation on Raspberry Pi | Decathlon (Hippocampus & Prostate) | torch | 3D NCA with patchification |
| Paper | 2023 | Grow from seed(s) | Emojis | torch | Steerable NCA |
| Paper | 2024 | MRI Registration (Prostate, Hippocampus, other) | OASIS-1, PROMISE12, Dryad | torch | 3D NCA with patchification |
| Paper | 2024 | X-ray segmentation on smartphone | Padchest, ChestX-ray8, MIMIC-III | torch | Med-NCA, trained with variance-weighted loss |
| Paper | 2024 | Classification | CIFAR-10-C | N/A | NCA-based Autoencoder |
| Paper | 2024 | Classification | FashionMNIST | N/A | NCA on photonics hardware |
| Paper | 2024 | Shape generation | Custom shapes | numpy+numba | HNCA (Hierarchical NCA) |
| Paper | 2024 | Skin lesion segmentation | ISIC2017 | N/A | UNet-style network with NCA bottleneck |
| Paper | 2024 | Generation | Optical Coherence Tomography | torch | Diffusion + NCA |
| Paper | 2025 | Segmentation, Depth Est., edge AI | Capsule Endoscopic | torch | NCA |
| Paper | 2025 | Continual Hippocampus MRI Segmentation | HarP, Dryad, DecathHip | torch | NCA with adaptible layers and multiple heads |
| Paper | 2025 | Image Compression | COCO 2017 | N/A | Grid-based, "GNCA" |
| Paper | 2025 | Grow from seed using learned logic gates | Emojis, Icons | jax | Differential Logic Gates + NCA |
| Paper | 2025 | Image Generation | CelebA, Pathology | torch | FourierDiff-NCA, Fourier-based diffusion |
| Paper | 2025 | Federated Learning | Ultrasound, X-ray | torch | Med-NCA backbone in federated setup |
NCA code repositories, including accompanying repositories for publications listed above.
- Growing-Neural-Cellular-Automata (Pytorch): Pytorch implementation of "Growing Neural Cellular Automata", including interactive pygame demo.
- M3D NCA: Implementation of Med-NCA, M3D-NCA and related works.
- VAE-NCA: Reproduction of paper "Image Generation With Neural Cellular Automata" (2020)
- Predicting Geographic Information with Neural Cellular Automata: Reproduction of paper.
- NCALab: Framework for training and evaluation of NCA models, including various examples for classification, segmentation, etc.
- Growing 3D Artefacts and Functional Machines with Neural Cellular Automata: Using NCA for generating Minecraft structures
- Learning Graph Cellular Automata: Code for paper
Tutorials and study material related to NCA.
- Video: Growing NCA in Pytorch
- Video: Growing NCA - 15 Minute paper review by Yannic Kilcher
- Video: What are Neural Cellular Automata?
- Youtube-Channel: Programmable Artificial Life - Several videos on NCA
- Two-minute Papers feature of Growing NCA
- NCA do active inference
- Graph Neural Cellular Automata - Blog article
Cool demo videos and visuals of NCAs in action.
- Video: Minecraft Morphogenesis
- Interactive: Random NCA - Clicking anywhere on the image randomizes the rule.
Contribution guidelines can be found in CONTRIBUTING.md
This list is under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. The list of authors can be found in the AUTHORS file.