Review for NeurIPS paper: Hierarchically Organized Latent Modules for Exploratory Search in Morphogenetic Systems

Summary and Contributions: This paper gives interesting evidence for the need of modularity for better exploration and diversity in goal-driven systems. In particular, the papers shows that a single neural network is worse than a dynamic modular architecture of sub-networks on diversity metrics. The paper formulates the notion of meta diversity, a search algorithm to hierarchically (tree structured) build modules that route decisions to either create new networks to handle incoming observations or decode it outcomes. A continuous version of the game-of-life system is used (Lenia) as the experimental platform. In this system, different starting states, rules and interventions lead to vastly different outcomes.