Miss Tools and Mr Fruit: Emergent communication in agents learning
about object affordances
Abstract
Recent research studies communication emergence in communities of deep network agents
assigned a joint task, hoping to gain insights
on human language evolution. We propose
here a new task capturing crucial aspects of
the human environment, such as natural object affordances, and of human conversation,
such as full symmetry among the participants.
By conducting a thorough pragmatic and semantic analysis of the emergent protocol, we
show that the agents solve the shared task
through genuine bilateral, referential communication. However, the agents develop multiple idiolects, which makes us conclude that
full symmetry is not a sufficient condition for
a common language to emerge