Expressivity of Emergent Languages is a Trade-off between Contextual Complexity and Unpredictability

Authors: Shangmin Guo, Yi Ren, Kory Wallace Mathewson, Simon Kirby, Stefano V Albrecht, Kenny Smith

ICLR 2022 | Conference PDF | Archive PDF | Plain Text | LLM Run Details

Reproducibility Variable Result LLM Response
Research Type Experimental We measure the expressivity of emergent languages based on the generalisation performance across different games, and demonstrate that the expressivity of emergent languages is a trade-off between the complexity and unpredictability of the context those languages emerged from.
Researcher Affiliation Collaboration Shangmin Guo: , Yi Ren;, Kory Mathewson , Simon Kirby:, Stefano V. Albrecht:, Kenny Smith: :University of Edinburgh, ;University of British Columbia, Deep Mind
Pseudocode Yes Procedure 1: Procedure for the language emergence and transfer experiment Input: A set of source game Gs, a set of target game Gt for every game gi s in Gs do 1. initialise a new speaker and listener for gi s, and train them to play gi s with the whole X; 2. after the agents converge on gi s, record L tpx, mq|x P Xu; 3. randomly shuffle and split L into 2 disjoint sets Ltrain and Ltest s.t. |Ltrain| 90% |L|; 4. for every game gj t in Gt do 1. initialise a new listener for gj t ; 2. train the listener with Ltrain to complete gj t ; 3. record the accuracy of listener on Ltest as the generalisation performance of gi s on gj t ; end end
Open Source Code Yes 3Codes are released at https://github.com/uoe-agents/Expressivity-of-Emergent-Languages.
Open Datasets No The paper describes the composition of its synthetic data ('input space X from which the speaker s observations are drawn, which consists of 10, 000 possible inputs'), and the code for generating it is likely available with the open-source code, but it does not provide a direct link, DOI, or citation for a pre-existing, named public dataset explicitly used or made available for download.
Dataset Splits No Procedure 1, step 3 states: 'randomly shuffle and split L into 2 disjoint sets Ltrain and Ltest s.t. |Ltrain| 90% |L|'. This describes training and test splits but does not explicitly mention a separate 'validation' set.
Hardware Specification Yes The experiments across 6 random seeds, 18 source games, 11 target games took 4, 216 hours in total, on Nvidia Tesla P100.
Software Dependencies No The paper mentions using the EGG framework, Adam algorithm, and Gumbel-Softmax trick, but it does not provide specific version numbers for these or other software libraries/dependencies.
Experiment Setup Yes As for updating the parameters, we use the Adam algorithm introduced by Kingma & Ba (2015), and the learning rate is set to 10-4. To allow the gradients being propagated through the discrete channel to overcome the sampling issue of messages, we apply the Gumbel-Softmax trick proposed by Jang et al. (2020), and the temperature hyper-parameter τ is set to 1.0.