iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Pierre-Yves Oudeyer @pyoudeyer.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

I'm happy to share a new podcast where I explain how I got to study curiosity, why it's fundamental in child development and how this got applied in self-improving robots/AI! 🙏 Thanks to the amazing Lynn Borton for hosting the podcast ! lynnborton.com/2026/08/27/m...

lynnborton.com

Make It Your Own: Autotelic Curiosity, with Pierre-Yves Oudeyer

Research Pierre-Yves Oudeyer and his team are studying autotelic curiosity, that marvelous ability to self-generate and self-select our own learning objectives, goals or games. They design robots to l...

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Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language (BCBL) @bcbl.bsky.social · 13/04/2026

[2/2] Joining us will be @jennysaffran.bsky.social, from @uwmadison.bsky.social; @noranewcombe.bsky.social, from Temple University; @pyoudeyer.bsky.social, from Inria; and Noam Sigelman, from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. 📅 June 10-12, 2026 +info ⬇️ www.bcbl.eu/events/stati...

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Pierre-Yves Oudeyer @pyoudeyer.bsky.social · 01/04/2026

🔍 What happens when you give middle-schoolers unrestricted access to ChatGPT for science tasks? Findings from our new paper led by Rania Abdelghani w/ @koumurayama.bsky.social @celestekidd.bsky.social Hélène Sauzéon 🧵👇

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Pierre-Yves Oudeyer @pyoudeyer.bsky.social · 10/03/2026

New blog post: The Phylogenetics of Artifacts — inferring the evolution of cultural objects, artificial life forms, and language models. From cat genetics to ancient myths to LLMs. 🧬 1/n

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Pierre-Yves Oudeyer @pyoudeyer.bsky.social · 16/07/2025

Major new system and result from the team: SOAR is an open-source self-improving genAI system pushing the frontier of ARC performances using program synthesis It relies on using LLMs as self-improving smart operators for evolutionary search

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Pierre-Yves Oudeyer @pyoudeyer.bsky.social · 10/06/2025

Using LLMs to advance the cognitive science of collectives Very interesting new paper by @sucholutsky.bsky.social Katherine Collins @norijacoby.bsky.social @billdthompson @roberthawkins.bsky.social arxiv.org/pdf/2506.00052

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Antoine Blanchard @enroweb.com · 06/06/2025

Le travail de Samuel Bianchini à partir des algorithmes de @pyoudeyer.bsky.social mis en lumière par le Jeu de paume dans son expo IA

Catalogue de l’expo « Le monde selon l’IA »

Artiste et enseignant-chercheur, Samuel Bianchini collabore avec de nombreux ingénieurs et scientifiques pour explorer les relations qu'entretiennent les nouvelles technologies avec les contextes culturels dans lesquels elles s'insèrent.
Dans cette troisième version de l'installation Prendre vie(s), Samuel Bianchini mobilise Flow Lenia, un logiciel de vie artificielle augmentee par IA. Cette forme d'animation, née d'une simulation mathématique appelée «jeu de la vie » en 1970, compose des systèmes susceptibles d'adopter des comportements émergents et inattendus.

Prendre vie(s), version 03, 2020-2025
Développement informatique (algorithmes de vie et d'intelligence artificielles):
Léon Denise et Adrian Mangel, sur la base de l'environnement logiciel Flow Lenia développé par l'équipe Flowers (Inris.
Université de Bordeaux - Pierre-Yves
Oudeyer, Clément Moulin-Fricr, Gautier Hamon et Erwan Plantee) à partir de Lenis. développé par Bert Chan (DeepMind). et avec la collaboration de Colin Bouvry Ce projet a bénéficié du soutien de l'École des arts décoratifs (Université PSL, Paris) et du festival accès)s( cultures électroniques
Remerciements: Alain Declercq.
Jean-Jacques Gay. Stéphane Trois Carrés

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Pierre-Yves Oudeyer @pyoudeyer.bsky.social · 28/05/2025

Humans' ability to invent their own games & goals is at the core of open-ended learning. Understanding and modeling computationally how they do it would be enlightening to understand better human cognition and build open-ended AI Great step in this direction in new paper by Guy Davidson et al.

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Melanie Mitchell @melaniemitchell.bsky.social · 19/05/2025

I reviewed "These Strange New Minds: How AI Learned to Talk and What It Means" by Chris Summerfield. melaniemitchell.me/EssaysConten...

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Pierre-Yves Oudeyer @pyoudeyer.bsky.social · 15/05/2025

royalsocietypublishing.org/toc/rstb/202...

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Marko Cvjetko @mcvjetko.bsky.social · 09/05/2025

Another one.

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Marko Cvjetko @mcvjetko.bsky.social · 09/05/2025

Here is a cool Flow-Lenia simulation, which is a continuous cellular automaton with two distinct features: 1. Mass conservation - sum of all activations is constant through time 2. Localized update rules - enables simulations with differently behaving matter on the same grid

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Clément Moulin-Frier @clemmoulinfrier.bsky.social · 12/05/2025

Very happy that our paper received both the EvoApps best paper and the EvoStar best student paper! Congrats team!! Emergent Kin Selection of Altruistic Feeding via Non-Episodic Neuroevolution arxiv.org/abs/2411.10536

arxiv.org

Emergent kin selection of altruistic feeding via non-episodic neuroevolution

Kin selection theory has proven to be a popular and widely accepted account of how altruistic behaviour can evolve under natural selection. Hamilton's rule, first published in 1964, has since been exp...

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Stefano Palminteri @stepalminteri.bsky.social · 29/04/2025

Check out @nicolasyax.bsky.social thread about our paper (co-supervised by @pyoudeyer.bsky.social) where we show that evolutionary tree reconstruction can be successfully applied to map LLMs to map relations and predict their performance! Currently at @iclr-conf.bsky.social

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Pierre-Yves Oudeyer @pyoudeyer.bsky.social · 25/04/2025

Generative AI is a cultural transmission technology: it plays a growing role in generation, selection and transmission of ideas/opinions in human society 🧠🔄🌐 And yet we understand very little of this dynamics at this point 🤔❓ A step forward is our #ICLR2025 paper !👇

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Pierre-Yves Oudeyer @pyoudeyer.bsky.social · 24/04/2025

Imagine you can compute a (very) cheap behavioural signatures for LLMs and from it 1) infer their history (which previous models they derived from) 2) build large maps to navigate spaces of 100s of models 3) predict (coarsely) their performances in benchmarks That's PhyloLM 🚀

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Pierre-Yves Oudeyer @pyoudeyer.bsky.social · 16/04/2025

We are starting a new major research project investigating the joint development of curiosity and metacognition in adolescents, where the Flowers lab will collaborate with @mjgruber.bsky.social 's lab at Univ. Cardiff, and Yana Fandakova at Univ. Trier !!! Open postdocs positions, see below 👇

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Pierre-Yves Oudeyer @pyoudeyer.bsky.social · 10/04/2025

Why Self-Determination Theory Needs Computational Modelling: The Case of Competence and Optimal Challenge by @codingconduct.cc E. Lintunen N. Aly @creativeendvs.bsky.social osf.io/n6x8s/downlo...

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Pierre-Yves Oudeyer @pyoudeyer.bsky.social · 03/04/2025

Forcing Diffuse Distributions out of Language Models "When LLMs are used for real-world tasks where diversity of outputs is crucial their inability to produce diffuse distributions over valid choices is a major hurdle" New method to address this challenge by Zhang et al.: arxiv.org/pdf/2404.10859

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Konrad Kording @kordinglab.bsky.social · 26/03/2025

Accepting “the bitter lesson” and embracing the brain’s complexity by Dyer and Richards. Great article! www.thetransmitter.org/neuroai/acce...

thetransmitter.org

» Accepting “the bitter lesson” and embracing the brain’s complexity Close menuMenuClose menuSpectrum logoYouTubeBlueskyMastodonYouTubeBlueskyMastodon

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Alberto Acerbi @acerbialberto.com · 26/03/2025

"The Appeal of Insight: Why Riddles and Whodunits Captivate Us" - These studies contribute to a growing literature in which the cultural success of fictional stories is explained by their ability to tap into specific cognitive mechanisms. osf.io/preprints/ps...

osf.io

OSF

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Stefano Palminteri @stepalminteri.bsky.social · 26/03/2025

Extreme stances about AI and LLMs in particular (be them deflationary or inflationary) are very likely wrong, valid and certainly not good for an healthy debate. But where do they come from? We (with @giadapistilli.com) argue that common cognitive biases may play a role: osf.io/preprints/ps...

osf.io

OSF

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Loris Gaven @lorisgaven.bsky.social · 24/03/2025

Humans excel at estimating their own competence and progress on tasks. But can LLM agents do the same? With 🧭MAGELLAN, our agent predicts its own learning progress across vast goal spaces, even generalizing to new tasks! 📄Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2502.07709

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Pierre-Yves Oudeyer @pyoudeyer.bsky.social · 24/03/2025

Enabling forms of metacognition in LLMs is a frontiers challenge in #AI We've made progress in this direction with MAGELLAN 🧭: curiosity-driven LLMs learn to predict and generalize their own learning progress in very large spaces of goals 🚀 This is then used for automatic curriculum learning 👇

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Stephen Wolfram @stephenwolfram.bsky.social · 18/03/2025

From the point of view of science I've never been too excited about the Game of Life. But now I realize that what's really exciting about it is what it tells us about what we can call metaengineering... writings.stephenwolfram.com/2025/03/what...

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Joel Simon @joelsimon.bsky.social · 12/03/2025

New research project: Lluminate - an evolutionary algorithm that helps LLMs break free from generating predictable, similar outputs. Combining evolutionary principles with creative thinking strategies can illuminate the space of possibilities. www.joelsimon.net/lluminate

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Pierre-Yves Oudeyer @pyoudeyer.bsky.social · 07/03/2025

Very good points Thomas Wolf ! This is to address this grand challenge that various labs (and mine in particular) have been working on mechanisms enabling AI systems to have capabilities for curiosity and metacognition 🧵

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Pierre-Yves Oudeyer @pyoudeyer.bsky.social · 06/03/2025

This is great news that Andrew Barto and Richard Sutton were awarded the #TuringAward 🚀 Thread 🧵

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Pierre-Yves Oudeyer @pyoudeyer.bsky.social · 03/03/2025

A key mechanisms in human curiosity-driven exploration is the ability to assess one's own learning progress in various tasks. Can humans predict future learning progress? When no learning has even started? Yes, to some extent ! see this cool paper from X. Zhang, S. McDougle, and J. Leonard

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Pierre-Yves Oudeyer @pyoudeyer.bsky.social · 03/03/2025

The Dynamics of Collective Creativity in Human-AI Social Networks by S. Shiiku, R. Marjieh, M. Anglada-Tort, N. Jacoby "...over time, hybrid human-AI networks became more diverse in their creations than AI-only networks." 📖 arxiv.org/pdf/2502.17962

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Sebastian Risi @risi.bsky.social · 10/02/2025

We're excited to announce the first Evolving Self-organisation workshop at GECCO 2025! Submission deadline: March 26, 2025 More information: evolving-self-organisation-workshop.github.io

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Milène Testa-Rioux @milenerioux.bsky.social · 11/02/2025

[Conférence 🎥] Revoir les interventions de @pyoudeyer.bsky.social et @droy.bsky.social, invités à la librairie #Mollat pour rencontrer 150 collégiens et collégiennes et présenter l'ouvrage "C'est (pas) moi, c'est l' #IA !" 🎦Le replay : www.youtube.com/watch?v=ONTP... 📘 Le livre : urlr.me/UHGsJS

youtube.com

Pierre-Yves Oudeyer et Didier Roy - C'est (pas) moi, c'est l'IA

YouTube video by librairie mollat

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Pierre-Yves Oudeyer @pyoudeyer.bsky.social · 28/01/2025

🌍How to ground generative AI in the external world? 🤖How to turn LLMs into curious open-ended agents that spontaneously explore and set their own goals? 🤝How to align such agents on the social environment? 📺 I address these questions & our associated research program in this talk 👇

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