Sebastian Risi (@risi1979) / X

Sebastian Risi

1,886 posts

Sebastian Risi

@risi1979

Researching @SakanaAILabs, ITU, Co-founder @ modl.ai. Collective Intelligence | Self-Organizing AI | Neuroevolution. ERC GROW-AI.

Joined April 2009

Pinned
Sebastian Risi
@risi1979
Nov 20, 2025
I’m beyond excited to announce our MIT Press book on Neuroevolution! An HTML version is now available for free on neuroevolutionbook.com, with a print edition coming out later in 2026. Real intelligence is not static; it evolves. For decades, the field of neuroevolution has
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Sebastian Risi
@risi1979
Oct 2, 2023
Introducing Neural Developmental Programs (NDPs)🧬🧠Instead of neural networks with fixed architectures, we allow neural networks to grow through a dynamic self-organizing process, inspired by how biological nervous systems develop👇 PDF: arxiv.org/abs/2307.08197
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Sebastian Risi
@risi1979
Dec 14, 2021
Finally done with my first blog post "The Future of Artificial Intelligence is Self-Organizing and Self-Assembling"! sebastianrisi.com/self_assemblin… Covering work from our group and others on the combination of ideas from deep learning and self-organizing systems.
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Sebastian Risi
@risi1979
Mar 17, 2021
Excited to share our work on Morphogenesis in Minecraft! We show that neural cellular automata can learn to grow not only complex 3D artifacts with over 3,000 blocks but also functional Minecraft machines that can regenerate when cut in half 🐛🔪=🐛🐛 PDF:arxiv.org/abs/2103.08737
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Sebastian Risi
@risi1979
Feb 14, 2023
Want to create your next game levels through natural language 🗣️🎮? Wait no more, we present: "MarioGPT: Open-Ended Text2Level Generation through Large Language Models". PDF: arxiv.org/abs/2302.05981 MarioGPT also predicts the player's path!
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Sebastian Risi
@risi1979
Jun 8, 2023
Biological brains 🧠 are characterized by neurons of many different classes. Yet most artificial neural networks only use one activation function throughout. We show that through neural diversity alone we can solve RL problems in networks with random weights 🤯
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Sebastian Risi
@risi1979
Jul 4, 2024
Evolving Self-Assembling Neural Networks: From Spontaneous Activity to Experience-Dependent Learning 🧠🧬 Building on our previous works on Neural Developmental Programs (NDPs), we propose a class of self-organizing neural networks capable of synaptic and structural plasticity!
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Sebastian Risi
@risi1979
Dec 12, 2022
Very grateful and honored to have been awarded an ERC Consolidator Grant of ~2 million Euro for my project GROW-AI: Growing Machines Capable of Rapid Learning in Unknown Environments. #ERCCoG Thanks to the @ERC_Research, my lab, and family for their support!
Sebastian Risi
@risi1979
May 11, 2019
Tired of training neural networks day in and day out? Maybe train virtual creatures instead and join us for the next Virtual Creature Competition @GECCO2019 virtualcreatures.github.io Deadline: June 23rd w/ @Kriegmerica and Nick Cheney. Check out past winners:
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Sebastian Risi
@risi1979
Jul 7, 2020
@enasmel and myself are excited to announce our paper "Meta-Learning through Hebbian Plasticity in Random Networks" arxiv.org/abs/2007.02686 Instead of optimizing the neural network's weights directly, we only search for synapse-specific Hebbian learning rules. Thread 👇
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Sebastian Risi
@risi1979
Jul 22, 2020
Many of the NeurIPS papers I'm currently reviewing: "Our algorithm is great. Here are some graphs. If you want any details on how anything works, see our 40 page appendix." 🤔
Sebastian Risi
@risi1979
Aug 4, 2021
For the next step towards a more general AI, we need artificial neural networks that also grow, develop, and self-organize.
Daniel Witvliet
@dwitvliet
Aug 4, 2021
How do brains rewire throughout life? Our paper out in @Nature today outlines several principles of brain circuit development that we found by mapping the complete wiring of eight brains. nature.com/articles/s4158… #neuroscience #connectomics #brain #neurons #celegans #science
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Sebastian Risi
@risi1979
Feb 19, 2019
Happy our "Deep Learning for Video Game Playing" review article is now published in IEEE Transactions on Games: bit.ly/2NdefQ8 PDF: arxiv.org/pdf/1708.07902… Lots of new methods added since the last update! @nojustesen @togelius @FilipoGiovanni
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Sebastian Risi
@risi1979
Jan 19, 2021
Our paper "Player-AI Interaction: What Neural Network Games Reveal About AI as Play" was accepted at #CHI2021! Core finding: AI as play can expand current notions of human-AI interaction, which are currently predominantly productivity-based. PDF: arxiv.org/abs/2101.06220
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