abstract = "A number of recent works have proposed techniques for end-to-end learning of communication protocols among cooperative multi-agent populations, and have simultaneously found the emergence of grounded human-interpretable language in the protocols developed by the agents, learned without any human supervision! In this paper, using a Task {\&} Talk reference game between two agents as a testbed, we present a sequence of {`}negative{'} results culminating in a {`}positive{'} one {--} showing that while most agent-invented languages are effective (i.e. achieve near-perfect task rewards), they are decidedly not interpretable or compositional. In essence, we find that natural language does not emerge {`}naturally{'},despite the semblance of ease of natural-language-emergence that one may gather from recent literature. We discuss how it is possible to coax the invented languages to become more and more human-like and compositional by increasing restrictions on how two agents may communicate.",
}
@article{kirby2015compression,
title={Compression and communication in the cultural evolution of linguistic structure},
author={Kirby, Simon and Tamariz, Monica and Cornish, Hannah and Smith, Kenny},
journal={Cognition},
volume={141},
pages={87--102},
year={2015},
publisher={Elsevier}
}
@inproceedings{lazaridou2018emergence,
title={Emergence of Linguistic Communication from Referential Games with Symbolic and Pixel Input},
author={Lazaridou, Angeliki and Hermann, Karl Moritz and Tuyls, Karl and Clark, Stephen},
booktitle={International Conference on Learning Representations},
year={2018}
}
@inproceedings{li2019ease,
title={Ease-of-teaching and language structure from emergent communication},
author={Li, Fushan and Bowling, Michael},
booktitle={Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems},
pages={15851--15861},
year={2019}
}
@inproceedings{evtimova2018emergent,
title={Emergent Communication in a Multi-Modal, Multi-Step Referential Game},
author={Evtimova, Katrina and Drozdov, Andrew and Kiela, Douwe and Cho, Kyunghyun},
booktitle={International Conference on Learning Representations},