Felix Reimers

Etienne Guichard, Felix Reimers, Mia Kvalsund et al.

This study introduces EngramNCA, a neural cellular automaton (NCA) that integrates both publicly visible states and private, cell-internal memory channels, drawing inspiration from emerging biological evidence suggesting that memory storage extends beyond synaptic modifications to include intracellular mechanisms. The proposed model comprises two components: GeneCA, an NCA trained to develop distinct morphologies from seed cells containing immutable "gene" encodings, and GenePropCA, an auxiliary NCA that modulates the private "genetic" memory of cells without altering their visible states. This architecture enables the encoding and propagation of complex morphologies through the interaction of visible and private channels, facilitating the growth of diverse structures from a shared "genetic" substrate. EngramNCA supports the emergence of hierarchical and coexisting morphologies, offering insights into decentralized memory storage and transfer in artificial systems. These findings have potential implications for the development of adaptive, self-organizing systems and may contribute to the broader understanding of memory mechanisms in both biological and synthetic contexts.

Felix Simon Reimers, Carl-Hendrik Peters, Stefano Nichele

Using data from mobile network utilization in Norway, we showcase the possibility of monitoring the state of communication and mobility networks with a non-invasive, low-cost method. This method transforms the network data into a model within the framework of reservoir computing and then measures the model's performance on proxy tasks. Experimentally, we show how the performance on these proxies relates to the state of the network. A key advantage of this approach is that it uses readily available data sets and leverages the reservoir computing framework for an inexpensive and largely agnostic method. Data from mobile network utilization is available in an anonymous, aggregated form with multiple snapshots per day. This data can be treated like a weighted network. Reservoir computing allows the use of weighted, but untrained networks as a machine learning tool. The network, initialized as a so-called echo state network (ESN), projects incoming signals into a higher dimensional space, on which a single trained layer operates. This consumes less energy than deep neural networks in which every weight of the network is trained. We use neuroscience inspired tasks and trained our ESN model to solve them. We then show how the performance depends on certain network configurations and also how it visibly decreases when perturbing the network. While this work serves as proof of concept, we believe it can be elevated to be used for near-real-time monitoring as well as the identification of possible weak spots of both mobile communication networks as well as transportation networks.