Related papers: How agents see things: On visual representations i…
Evidence that visual communication preceded written language and provided a basis for it goes back to prehistory, in forms such as cave and rock paintings depicting traces of our distant ancestors. Emergent communication research has sought…
In order to communicate, humans flatten a complex representation of ideas and their attributes into a single word or a sentence. We investigate the impact of representation learning in artificial agents by developing graph referential…
We present ESCELL, a method for developing an emergent symbolic language of communication between multiple agents reasoning about cells. We show how agents are able to cooperate and communicate successfully in the form of symbols similar to…
Human languages provide efficient systems for expressing numerosities, but whether the sheer pressure to communicate is enough for numerical representations to arise in artificial agents, and whether the emergent codes resemble human…
In natural language, referencing objects at different levels of specificity is a fundamental pragmatic mechanism for efficient communication in context. We develop a novel communication game, the hierarchical reference game, to study the…
Emergent language research has made significant progress in recent years, but still largely fails to explore how communication emerges in more complex and situated multi-agent systems. Existing setups often employ a reference game, which…
Referential games and reconstruction games are the most common game types for studying emergent languages. We investigate how the type of the language game affects the emergent language in terms of: i) language compositionality and ii)…
Language is a powerful communicative and cognitive tool. It enables humans to express thoughts, share intentions, and reason about complex phenomena. Despite our fluency in using and understanding language, the question of how it arises and…
The question of how an effective and efficient communication system can emerge in a population of agents that need to solve a particular task attracts more and more attention from researchers in many fields, including artificial…
Emergent communication in artificial agents has been studied to understand language evolution, as well as to develop artificial systems that learn to communicate with humans. We show that agents performing a cooperative navigation task in…
Emergent communication offers insight into how agents develop shared structured representations, yet most research assumes homogeneous modalities or aligned representational spaces, overlooking the perceptual heterogeneity of real-world…
We present an investigation into how representational losses can affect the drawings produced by artificial agents playing a communication game. Building upon recent advances, we show that a combination of powerful pretrained encoder…
When communicating, people behave consistently across conversational roles: People understand the words they say and are able to produce the words they hear. To date, artificial agents developed for language tasks have lacked such symmetry,…
The literature in modern machine learning has only negative results for learning to communicate between competitive agents using standard RL. We introduce a modified sender-receiver game to study the spectrum of partially-competitive…
How do we know if communication is emerging in a multi-agent system? The vast majority of recent papers on emergent communication show that adding a communication channel leads to an increase in reward or task success. This is a useful…
Research on emergent communication between deep-learning-based agents has received extensive attention due to its inspiration for linguistics and artificial intelligence. However, previous attempts have hovered around emerging communication…
Computational simulations are a popular method for testing hypotheses about the emergence of communication. This kind of research is performed in a variety of traditions including language evolution, developmental psychology, cognitive…
Symbols are shared, but perception is private. We study emergent communication between heterogeneous visual agents through decentralized learning, asking what visual information can become shareable when agents have different visual…
In many situations, communication between agents is a critical component of cooperative multi-agent systems, however, it can be difficult to learn or evolve. In this paper, we investigate a simple way in which the emergence of communication…
The development of embodied agents that can communicate with humans in natural language has gained increasing interest over the last years, as it facilitates the diffusion of robotic platforms in human-populated environments. As a step…