INTERNAL-CONSISTENCY CONSTRAINTS FOR EMERGENT COMMUNICATION

Charles Lovering, Ellie Pavlick

Keywords: Emergent Communication, Speaker-Listener Models

TL;DR: Internal-consistency constraints improve agents ability to develop emergent protocols that generalize across communicative roles.

Abstract: When communicating, humans rely on internally-consistent language representations. That is, as speakers, we expect listeners to behave the same way we do when we listen. This work proposes several methods for encouraging such internal consistency in dialog agents in an emergent communication setting. We consider two hypotheses about the effect of internal-consistency constraints: 1) that they improve agents’ ability to refer to unseen referents, and 2) that they improve agents’ ability to generalize across communicative roles (e.g. performing as a speaker de- spite only being trained as a listener). While we do not find evidence in favor of the former, our results show significant support for the latter.

Code: http://bit.ly/internal-consistency-emergent-communication