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…
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.
Oooh, this made it click for me. Thank you
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.