Learning Developmental Scaffoldings to Guide Self-Organisation

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2605.14998v2
• Date: Fri, 15 May 2026 10:08:29 GMT
• Title: Learning Developmental Scaffoldings to Guide Self-Organisation
• Abstract summary: We study how information is distributed between pre-patterns and the self-organising process.<n>Our analysis suggests that effective pre-patterns do not simply approximate their targets; rather, they bias the developmental dynamics in ways that facilitate convergence.
• Score: 5.898114915426536
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: From subcellular structures to entire organisms, many natural systems generate complex organisation through self-organisation: local interactions that collectively give rise to global structure without any blueprint of the outcome. Yet a significant portion of the information driving such processes is not produced by self-organisation itself, instead, it is often offloaded to initial conditions of the system. Biological development is a prime example, where maternal pre-patterns encode positional and symmetry-breaking information that scaffolds the self-organising process. From maternal morphogen gradients in early embryogenesis to tissue-level morphogenetic pre-patterns guiding organ formation, this transfer of information to initial conditions, analogous to a memory-compute trade-off in computational systems, is a fundamental part of developmental processes. In this work, we study this offloading phenomenon by introducing a model that jointly learns both the self-organisation rules and the pre-patterns, allowing their interplay to be varied and measured under controlled conditions: a Neural Cellular Automaton (NCA) paired with a learned coordinate-based pattern generator (SIREN), both trained simultaneously to generate a set of patterns. We provide information-theoretic analyses of how information is distributed between pre-patterns and the self-organising process, and show that jointly learning both components yields improvements in robustness, encoding capacity, and symmetry breaking over purely self-organising alternatives. Our analysis further suggests that effective pre-patterns do not simply approximate their targets; rather, they bias the developmental dynamics in ways that facilitate convergence, pointing to a non-trivial relationship between the structure of initial conditions and the dynamics of self-organisation.

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