Related papers: When Efficient Communication Explains Convexity
Information compression is essential to reduce communication cost in distributed optimization over peer-to-peer networks. This paper proposes a communication-efficient linearly convergent distributed (COLD) algorithm to solve strongly…
Contrastive explanations clarify why an event occurred in contrast to another. They are more inherently intuitive to humans to both produce and comprehend. We propose a methodology to produce contrastive explanations for classification…
This article studies the emergence of ambiguity in communication through the concept of logical irreversibility and within the framework of Shannon's information theory. This leads us to a precise and general expression of the intuition…
This paper explores the impact of variable pragmatic competence on communicative success through simulating language learning and conversing between speakers and listeners with different levels of reasoning abilities. Through studying this…
Recent work shows issues of consistency with explanations, with methods generating local explanations that seem reasonable instance-wise, but that are inconsistent across instances. This suggests not only that instance-wise explanations can…
Human communication systems, such as language, evolve culturally; their components undergo reproduction and variation. However, a role for selection in cultural evolutionary dynamics is less clear. Often neutral evolution (also known as…
Why is ordinary language vague? We argue that in contexts in which a cooperative speaker is not perfectly informed about the world, the use of vague expressions can offer an optimal tradeoff between truthfulness (Gricean Quality) and…
Word class flexibility refers to the phenomenon whereby a single word form is used across different grammatical categories. Extensive work in linguistic typology has sought to characterize word class flexibility across languages, but…
The uniform information density (UID) hypothesis proposes that speakers aim to distribute information evenly throughout a text, balancing production effort and listener comprehension difficulty. However, language typically does not maintain…
Task-oriented semantic communication emerges as a crucial paradigm for next-generation wireless networks, aiming to efficiently transmit task-relevant information while reducing interference and redundancy across multiple users. Existing…
Finding and facilitating commonalities between the linguistic behaviors of large language models and humans could lead to major breakthroughs in our understanding of the acquisition, processing, and evolution of language. However, most…
Common sense suggests that when individuals explain why they believe something, we can arrive at more accurate conclusions than when they simply state what they believe. Yet, there is no known mechanism that provides incentives to elicit…
Written language is a complex communication signal capable of conveying information encoded in the form of ordered sequences of words. Beyond the local order ruled by grammar, semantic and thematic structures affect long-range patterns in…
Resource-constrained systems are prevalent in communications. Such a system is composed of many components but only some of them can be allocated with resources such as time slots. According to the amount of information about the system,…
Why do neurons encode information the way they do? Normative answers to this question model neural activity as the solution to an optimisation problem; for example, the celebrated efficient coding hypothesis frames neural activity as the…
What processes can explain how very large populations are able to converge on the use of a particular word or grammatical construction without global coordination? Answering this question helps to understand why new language constructs…
Emergent communication protocols among humans and artificial neural network agents do not yet share the same properties and show some critical mismatches in results. We describe three important phenomena with respect to the emergence and…
A key feature of human theory-of-mind is the ability to attribute beliefs to other agents as mentalistic explanations for their behavior. But given the wide variety of beliefs that agents may hold about the world and the rich language we…
Most languages use the relative order between words to encode meaning relations. Languages differ, however, in what orders they use and how these orders are mapped onto different meanings. We test the hypothesis that, despite these…
Explanations are pervasive in our lives. Mostly, they occur in dialogical form where an {\em explainer} discusses a concept or phenomenon of interest with an {\em explainee}. Leaving the explainee with a clear understanding is not…