Biological intelligence has driven significant progress in artificial intelligence (AI), but a critical gap remains: biological systems inherit innate abilities from genes, with brains initialized by blueprints refined over 3.5 billion years of evolution, while machines rely heavily on inefficient, data-driven learning from scratch. This gap arises from the lack of a genetic mechanism in machines to transfer and accumulate inheritable knowledge across generations. To bridge this gap, we propose learngenes, network fragments that act as inheritable 'genes' for machines. Unlike conventional knowledge transfer methods, learngenes enable efficient and universal knowledge transfer by selectively encapsulating task-agnostic knowledge. To facilitate the transfer and accumulation of task-agnostic knowledge across generations, we introduce Genetic Reinforcement Learning (GRL), a framework that simulates the learning and evolution of organisms in intelligent agents following Lamarckian principles. Through GRL, we identify learngenes as network fragments within agents' policy networks, equipping newborn agents with innate abilities for rapid adaptation to novel tasks. We demonstrate the advantages of learngene-based knowledge transfer over evolution-based search and traditional pre-trained models, and show how learngenes evolve through the accumulation of task-agnostic knowledge. Overall, this work establishes a novel paradigm for knowledge transfer and model initialization in AI, offering new possibilities for more adaptive, efficient, and scalable learning systems.

Diffusion models have advanced from text-to-image (T2I) to image-to-image (I2I) generation by incorporating structured inputs such as depth maps, enabling fine-grained spatial control. However, existing methods either train separate models for each condition or rely on unified architectures with entangled representations, resulting in poor generalization and high adaptation costs for novel conditions. To this end, we propose DivControl, a decomposable pretraining framework for unified controllable generation and efficient adaptation. DivControl factorizes ControlNet via SVD into basic components—pairs of singular vectors—which are disentangled into condition-agnostic learngenes and condition-specific tailors through knowledge diversion during multi-condition training. Knowledge diversion is implemented via a dynamic gate that performs soft routing over tailors based on the semantics of condition instructions, enabling zero-shot generalization and parameter-efficient adaptation to novel conditions. To further improve condition fidelity and training efficiency, we introduce a representation alignment loss that aligns condition embeddings with early diffusion features. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DivControl achieves state-of-the-art controllability with 36.4× less training cost, while simultaneously improving average performance on basic conditions. It also delivers strong zero-shot and few-shot performance on unseen conditions, demonstrating superior scalability, modularity, and transferability.

The growing complexity of model parameters underscores the significance of pre-trained models. However, deployment constraints often necessitate models of varying sizes, exposing limitations in the conventional pre-training and fine-tuning paradigm, particularly when target model sizes are incompatible with pre-trained ones. To address this challenge, we propose WAVE, a novel approach that reformulates variable-sized model initialization from a multitask perspective, where initializing each model size is treated as a distinct task. WAVE employs shared, size-agnostic weight templates alongside size-specific weight scalers to achieve consistent initialization across various model sizes. These weight templates, constructed within the Learngene framework, integrate knowledge from pre-trained models through a distillation process constrained by Kronecker-based rules. Target models are then initialized by concatenating and weighting these templates, with adaptive connection rules established by lightweight weight scalers, whose parameters are learned from minimal training data. Extensive experiments demonstrate the efficiency of WAVE, achieving state-of-the-art performance in initializing models of various depth and width. The knowledge encapsulated in weight templates is also task-agnostic, allowing for seamless transfer across diverse downstream datasets. Code will be made available at https://github.com/fu-feng/WAVE.

"Creative" remains an inherently abstract concept for both humans and diffusion models. While text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models can easily generate out-of-distribution concepts like "a blue banana", they struggle with generating combinatorial objects such as "a creative mixture that resembles a lettuce and a mantis", due to difficulties in understanding the semantic depth of "creative". Current methods rely heavily on synthesizing reference prompts or images to achieve a creative effect, typically requiring retraining for each unique creative output—a process that is computationally intensive and limits practical applications. To address this, we introduce CreTok, which brings meta-creativity to diffusion models by redefining "creative" as a new token,, thus enhancing models’ semantic understanding for combinatorial creativity. CreTok achieves such redefinition by iteratively sampling diverse text pairs from our proposed CangJie dataset to form adaptive prompts and restrictive prompts, and then optimizing the similarity between their respective text embeddings. Extensive experiments demonstrate thatenables the universal and direct generation of combinatorial creativity across diverse concepts without additional training, achieving state-of-the-art performance with improved text-image alignment and higher human preference ratings. Code will be made available at https://github.com/fu-feng/CreTok.

Pre-trained models have become the preferred backbone due to the increasing complexity of model parameters. However, traditional pre-trained models often face deployment challenges due to their fixed sizes, and are prone to negative transfer when discrepancies arise between training tasks and target tasks. To address this, we propose **KIND**, a novel pre-training method designed to construct decomposable models. KIND integrates knowledge by incorporating Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) as a structural constraint, with each basic component represented as a combination of a column vector, singular value, and row vector from $U$, $\Sigma$, and $V^\top$ matrices. These components are categorized into **learngenes** for encapsulating class-agnostic knowledge and \textbf{tailors} for capturing class-specific knowledge, with knowledge diversion facilitated by a class gate mechanism during training. Extensive experiments demonstrate that models pre-trained with KIND can be decomposed into learngenes and tailors, which can be adaptively recombined for diverse resource-constrained deployments. Moreover, for tasks with large domain shifts, transferring only learngenes with task-agnostic knowledge, when combined with randomly initialized tailors, effectively mitigates domain shifts. Code will be made available at https://github.com/Te4P0t/KIND.

Knowledge in modern neural networks is often entangled and structurally opaque, making current transfer methods—typically based on reusing entire parameter sets—inefficient and inflexible. Efforts to improve flexibility by reusing partial parameters frequently depend on handcrafted heuristics or rigid structural assumptions, which constrain generalization. In contrast, biological evolution enables efficient knowledge transfer by encoding only essential information into genes through iterative refinement under environmental pressure. Inspired by this principle, we propose **ECO**, a framework that **E**volves **CO**re knowledge into modular, reusable neural components—termed *learngenes*—through similar evolutionary dynamics. To this end, we redefine learngenes as neural circuits and introduce Genetic Transfer Learning (GTL), a biologically inspired paradigm that establishes a genetic mechanism within neural networks in the context of supervised learning. GTL simulates evolutionary processes by generating diverse network populations, selecting high-performing individuals, and transferring their learngenes to subsequent generations. Through iterative refinement, GTL enables learngenes to accumulate transferable common knowledge. Extensive experiments show that ECO achieves efficient initialization and strong generalization across diverse models and tasks, while significantly reducing computational and memory costs compared to conventional methods.

In recent years, the merging of vast datasets with powerful computational resources has led to the emergence of large pre-trained models in the field of deep learning. However, the common practices often overgeneralize the applicability of these models, overlooking the task-specific resource constraints. To mitigate this issue, we propose \textbf{Cluster-Learngene}, which effectively clusters critical internal modules from a large ancestry model and then inherits them to initialize descendant models of elastic scales. Specifically, based on the density characteristics of attention heads, our method adaptively clusters attention heads of each layer and position-wise feed-forward networks (FFNs) in the ancestry model as the learngene. Moreover, we introduce priority weight-sharing and learnable parameter transformations that expand the learngene to initialize descendant models of elastic scales. Through extensive experimentation, we demonstrate that Cluster-Learngene not only is more efficient compared to other initialization methods but also customizes models of elastic scales according to downstream task resources.