Emergent communication in a multi-modal, multi-step referential game

Katrina Evtimova, Andrew Drozdov, Douwe Kiela, Kyunghyun Cho

Research output: Contribution to conferencePaperpeer-review

Abstract

Inspired by previous work on emergent communication in referential games, we propose a novel multi-modal, multi-step referential game, where the sender and receiver have access to distinct modalities of an object, and their information exchange is bidirectional and of arbitrary duration. The multi-modal multi-step setting allows agents to develop an internal communication significantly closer to natural language, in that they share a single set of messages, and that the length of the conversation may vary according to the difficulty of the task. We examine these properties empirically using a dataset consisting of images and textual descriptions of mammals, where the agents are tasked with identifying the correct object. Our experiments indicate that a robust and efficient communication protocol emerges, where gradual information exchange informs better predictions and higher communication bandwidth improves generalization.

Original languageEnglish (US)
StatePublished - Jan 1 2018
Event6th International Conference on Learning Representations, ICLR 2018 - Vancouver, Canada
Duration: Apr 30 2018May 3 2018

Conference

Conference6th International Conference on Learning Representations, ICLR 2018
Country/TerritoryCanada
CityVancouver
Period4/30/185/3/18

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Language and Linguistics
  • Education
  • Computer Science Applications
  • Linguistics and Language

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