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arXiv · 1705.10369

Emergent Communication in a Multi-Modal, Multi-Step Referential Game

Katrina Evtimova·Andrew Drozdov·Douwe Kiela·Kyunghyun Cho
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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.

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Katrina Evtimova, Andrew Drozdov, Douwe Kiela, Kyunghyun Cho. 2017-05-29. Emergent Communication in a Multi-Modal, Multi-Step Referential Game. https://arxiv.org/abs/1705.10369

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