{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/arbitrarily-scalable-environment-generators","title":"Arbitrarily Scalable Environment Generators via Neural Cellular Automata","arxiv_id":"2310.18622","date":"2023-10-28","proceeding":"NeurIPS 2023 11","authors":["Yulun Zhang","Matthew C. Fontaine","Varun Bhatt","Stefanos Nikolaidis","Jiaoyang Li"],"abstract":"We study the problem of generating arbitrarily large environments to improve the throughput of multi-robot systems. Prior work proposes Quality Diversity (QD) algorithms as an effective method for optimizing the environments of automated warehouses. However, these approaches optimize only relatively small environments, falling short when it comes to replicating real-world warehouse sizes. The challenge arises from the exponential increase in the search space as the environment size increases. Additionally, the previous methods have only been tested with up to 350 robots in simulations, while practical warehouses could host thousands of robots. In this paper, instead of optimizing environments, we propose to optimize Neural Cellular Automata (NCA) environment generators via QD algorithms. We train a collection of NCA generators with QD algorithms in small environments and then generate arbitrarily large environments from the generators at test time. We show that NCA environment generators maintain consistent, regularized patterns regardless of environment size, significantly enhancing the scalability of multi-robot systems in two different domains with up to 2,350 robots. Additionally, we demonstrate that our method scales a single-agent reinforcement learning policy to arbitrarily large environments with similar patterns. We include the source code at \\url{https://github.com/lunjohnzhang/warehouse_env_gen_nca_public}.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.18622v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2310.18622v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"arbitrarily-scalable-environment-generators","repo_url":"https://github.com/lunjohnzhang/warehouse_env_gen_nca_public","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"pytorch","reach":{"status":"ok"}}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2310.18622","mcp":{"get_harvested_code_for_paper":{"arxiv_id":"2310.18622"}},"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers","read_at":"2026-09-24T18:15:14+00:00","read_at_is":"when the build read Syntology's graph, not when any sample ran","claim":"Per-sample execution status on synthesized fixtures; not a correctness claim about the paper. Samples come from repositories linked to the paper, official or community; repo_kind says which.","repos":[{"provenance":"deterministic:regex_extraction","url":"https://github.com/lunjohnzhang/warehouse_","reach":{"status":"gone","observed_at":"2026-09-17","how":"tree_404+repo_404"}},{"provenance":"external:paperswithcode_snapshot_2025-07-28","url":"https://github.com/lunjohnzhang/warehouse_env_gen_nca_public","reach":{"status":"ok"}}],"summary":{"ran":1},"by_repo_kind":{"official":{"samples":1,"ran":1,"repositories":1}},"repo_kind_vocabulary":{"official":"The archive marks this repository official for the paper","named_in_paper":"The archive records that the paper mentions this repository; it is not marked official","listed":"In the archive's code links for this paper, not marked official and not recorded as mentioned in the paper","found_in_text":"Syntology found this repository in the paper's own text; whether it is the authors' implementation is not asserted","community":"Not in the archive's code links for this paper; a community repository Syntology harvested"},"n_pointer_only_for_licence":1,"samples":[{"code_sha256_prefix":"f8cfb9edf29e7834","entry":"cal_similarity_score","repo":"lunjohnzhang/warehouse_env_gen_nca_public","repo_kind":"official","path":"env_search/warehouse/module.py","file_url":"https://github.com/lunjohnzhang/warehouse_env_gen_nca_public/blob/HEAD/env_search/warehouse/module.py","link_basis":"first_harvest_node","language":"python","status":"ran","verification_level":1,"contract_check":null,"metamorphic_tier":null,"behaviour_fingerprint":false,"licence":"NONE","inline_ok":false,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"f8cfb9edf29e7834"}}]},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}