Trading off Utility, Informativeness, and Complexity in Emergent Communication

Authors: Mycal Tucker, Roger Levy, Julie A. Shah, Noga Zaslavsky

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

Reproducibility Variable Result LLM Response
Research Type Experimental We evaluate our approach in multi-agent reinforcement learning settings and in color reference games and show that: (1) VQVIB agents can continuously adapt to changing communicative needs and, in the color domain, align with human languages; (2) the emergent VQ-VIB embedding spaces are semantically meaningful and perceptually grounded; and (3) encouraging informativeness leads to faster convergence rates and improved utility, both in VQVIB and in prior neural architectures for symbolic EC, with VQ-VIB achieving higher utility for any given complexity.
Researcher Affiliation Academia Mycal Tucker M.I.T. mycal@mit.edu Roger Levy M.I.T. rplevy@mit.edu Julie Shah M.I.T. julie_a_shah@csail.mit.edu Noga Zaslavsky M.I.T. nogazs@mit.edu
Pseudocode No The paper does not contain any clearly labeled pseudocode or algorithm blocks.
Open Source Code Yes Code is available at https://github.com/mycal-tucker/vqvib_neurips2022
Open Datasets Yes The target and distractor are sampled independently from the 330 color chips of the World Color Survey [WCS, 42] shown in Figure 3c, according to a humanbased prior from [13]. The WCS data are available at www1.icsi.berkeley.edu/wcs and the human-based color prior is available at https://github.com/nogazs/ib-color-naming.
Dataset Splits No The paper does not explicitly provide training/validation/test dataset splits by percentages or sample counts in the main text. It mentions 'validation loss' in Appendix D.1 but no details on the split itself.
Hardware Specification Yes All experiments were run on a single NVIDIA Quadro RTX 6000 GPU (24GB memory) or a single NVIDIA A100 GPU (40GB memory).
Software Dependencies No The paper does not list specific software dependencies with version numbers.
Experiment Setup Yes Full details of the architectures, hyperparameters, and environments are provided in Appendix D.