Related papers: Ease-of-Teaching and Language Structure from Emerg…
To develop computational agents that better communicate using their own emergent language, we endow the agents with an ability to focus their attention on particular concepts in the environment. Humans often understand an object or scene as…
Natural language allows us to refer to novel composite concepts by combining expressions denoting their parts according to systematic rules, a property known as \emph{compositionality}. In this paper, we study whether the language emerging…
We present the notion of explainability for decision-making processes in a pedagogically structured autonomous environment. Multi-agent systems that are structured pedagogically consist of pedagogical teachers and learners that operate in…
Languages vary widely in how meanings map to word forms. These mappings have been found to support efficient communication; however, this theory does not account for systematic relations within word forms. We examine how a restricted set of…
Significant advances have been made in artificial systems by using biological systems as a guide. However, there is often little interaction between computational models for emergent communication and biological models of the emergence of…
Populations have often been perceived as a structuring component for language to emerge and evolve: the larger the population, the more structured the language. While this observation is widespread in the sociolinguistic literature, it has…
Explicit communication among humans is key to coordinating and learning. Social learning, which uses cues from experts, can greatly benefit from the usage of explicit communication to align heterogeneous policies, reduce sample complexity,…
By the age of two, children tend to assume that new word categories are based on objects' shape, rather than their color or texture; this assumption is called the shape bias. They are thought to learn this bias by observing that their…
Humans use language to collectively execute abstract strategies besides using it as a referential tool for identifying physical entities. Recently, multiple attempts at replicating the process of emergence of language in artificial agents…
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…
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…
Natural language exhibits various universal properties. But why do these universals exist? One explanation is that they arise from functional pressures to achieve efficient communication, a view which attributes cross-linguistic properties…
Natural languages display a trade-off among different strategies to convey syntactic structure, such as word order or inflection. This trade-off, however, has not appeared in recent simulations of iterated language learning with neural…
Learning to communicate through interaction, rather than relying on explicit supervision, is often considered a prerequisite for developing a general AI. We study a setting where two agents engage in playing a referential game and, from…
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…
Compositionality has traditionally been understood as a major factor in productivity of language and, more broadly, human cognition. Yet, recently, some research started to question its status, showing that artificial neural networks are…
The iterated learning model simulates the transmission of language from generation to generation in order to explore how the constraints imposed by language transmission facilitate the emergence of language structure. Despite each modelled…
Effective communication requires the ability to refer to specific parts of an observation in relation to others. While emergent communication literature shows success in developing various language properties, no research has shown the…
In previous work, artificial agents were shown to achieve almost perfect accuracy in referential games where they have to communicate to identify images. Nevertheless, the resulting communication protocols rarely display salient features of…
The iterated learning model is an agent model which simulates the transmission of of language from generation to generation. It is used to study how the language adapts to pressures imposed by transmission. In each iteration, a language…