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},
For example, ~\citet{kirby2015compression} explored how the pressures for compressivity and compressibility lead the structured language.
~\citet{kottur-etal-2017-natural} constrained the vocabulary size and whether the listener has memory to coax the compositionality of the emergent language.
~\citet{lazaridou2018emergence} showed that the degree of structure found in the input data affects the emergence of the symbolic language.
~\citet{li2019ease} studied how the pressure, ease of teaching, impact on the iterative language of the population regime.
~\citet{evtimova2018emergent} designed a novel multi-modal scenarios, which the speaker and the listener should access to different modalities of the input object, to explore the language emergence.
Such factors are deliberately designed, which are too ideal to be true in
the real world. None of these works realizes the importance of model capacity of
agent itself. \rmk{this should be largely emphasized.}
