We examine the effects of instantiating Lewis signaling games within a population of speaker and listener agents with the aim of producing a set of general and robust representations of unstructured pixel data. Preliminary experiments suggest that the set of representations associated with languages generated within a population outperform those generated between a single speaker-listener pair on this objective, making a case for the adoption of population-based approaches in emergent communication studies. Furthermore, post-hoc analysis reveals that population-based learning induces a number of novel factors to the conventional emergent communication setup, inviting a wide range of future research questions regarding communication dynamics and the flow of information within them.
@article{arxiv.1911.04362,
title = {To Populate is To Regulate},
author = {Nicole Fitzgerald},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1911.04362},
year = {2019}
}