Complex System Exploration with Interactive Human Guidance

Bastien Morel, Clément Moulin-Frier, Pascal Barla

Published: 2025/10/1

Abstract

The diversity of patterns that emerge from complex systems motivates their use for scientific or artistic purposes. When exploring these systems, the challenges faced are the size of the parameter space and the strongly non-linear mapping between parameters and emerging patterns. In addition, artists and scientists who explore complex systems do so with an expectation of particular patterns. Taking these expectations into account adds a new set of challenges, which the exploration process must address. We provide design choices and their implementation to address these challenges; enabling the maximization of the diversity of patterns discovered in the user's region of interest -- which we call the constrained diversity -- in a sample-efficient manner. The region of interest is expressed in the form of explicit constraints. These constraints are formulated by the user in a system-agnostic way, and their addition enables interactive system exploration leading to constrained diversity, while maintaining global diversity.