From Grunts to Lexicons: Emergent Language from Cooperative Foraging
This work addresses the fundamental question of language evolution for researchers in linguistics, AI, and cognitive science, though it is incremental as it builds on existing multi-agent and emergent communication frameworks.
The paper tackles the problem of how language emerges by simulating multi-agent foraging games with deep reinforcement learning, finding that agents develop communication protocols with key features of natural language such as arbitrariness and compositionality, and quantifies these properties under various factors like population size.
Language is a powerful communicative and cognitive tool. It enables humans to express thoughts, share intentions, and reason about complex phenomena. Despite our fluency in using and understanding language, the question of how it arises and evolves over time remains unsolved. A leading hypothesis in linguistics and anthropology posits that language evolved to meet the ecological and social demands of early human cooperation. Language did not arise in isolation, but through shared survival goals. Inspired by this view, we investigate the emergence of language in multi-agent Foraging Games. These environments are designed to reflect the cognitive and ecological constraints believed to have influenced the evolution of communication. Agents operate in a shared grid world with only partial knowledge about other agents and the environment, and must coordinate to complete games like picking up high-value targets or executing temporally ordered actions. Using end-to-end deep reinforcement learning, agents learn both actions and communication strategies from scratch. We find that agents develop communication protocols with hallmark features of natural language: arbitrariness, interchangeability, displacement, cultural transmission, and compositionality. We quantify each property and analyze how different factors, such as population size, social dynamics, and temporal dependencies, shape specific aspects of the emergent language. Our framework serves as a platform for studying how language can evolve from partial observability, temporal reasoning, and cooperative goals in embodied multi-agent settings. We will release all data, code, and models publicly.