Speaking Your Language: Spatial Relationships in Interpretable Emergent Communication
This addresses the lack of positional references in emergent communication, which is incremental as it builds on existing literature to show interpretable spatial language emergence.
The paper tackled the problem of enabling agents to communicate spatial relationships within their observations, demonstrating that agents can develop a language achieving over 90% accuracy in a referential game and over 78% accuracy in human interpretability tests.
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 emergence of such positional references. This paper demonstrates how agents can communicate about spatial relationships within their observations. The results indicate that agents can develop a language capable of expressing the relationships between parts of their observation, achieving over 90% accuracy when trained in a referential game which requires such communication. Using a collocation measure, we demonstrate how the agents create such references. This analysis suggests that agents use a mixture of non-compositional and compositional messages to convey spatial relationships. We also show that the emergent language is interpretable by humans. The translation accuracy is tested by communicating with the receiver agent, where the receiver achieves over 78% accuracy using parts of this lexicon, confirming that the interpretation of the emergent language was successful.