Abstract: Several approaches have recently been proposed for learning decentralized deep multiagent policies that coordinate via a differentiable communication channel. While these policies are effective for many tasks, interpretation of their induced communication strategies has remained a challenge. Here we propose to interpret agents' messages by translating them. Unlike in typical machine translation problems, we have no parallel data to learn from. Instead we develop a translation model based on the insight that agent messages and natural language strings mean the same thing if they induce the same belief about the world in a listener. We present theoretical guarantees and empirical evidence that our approach preserves both the semantics and pragmatics of messages by ensuring that players communicating through a translation layer do not suffer a substantial loss in reward relative to players with a common language.

Introduction: Several recent papers have described approaches for learning deep communicating policies (DCPs): decentralized representations of behavior that enable multiple agents to communicate via a differentiable channel that can be formulated as a recurrent neural network. DCPs have been shown to solve a variety of coordination problems, including reference games BIBREF0 , logic puzzles BIBREF1 , and simple control BIBREF2 . Appealingly, the agents' communication protocol can be learned via direct backpropagation through the communication channel, avoiding many of the challenging inference problems associated with learning in classical decentralized decision processes BIBREF3 . But analysis of the strategies induced by DCPs has remained a challenge. As an example, fig:teaser depicts a driving game in which two cars, which are unable to see each other, must both cross an intersection without colliding. In order to ensure success, it is clear that the cars must communicate with each other. But a number of successful communication strategies are possible—for example, they might report their exact $(x, y)$ coordinates at every timestep, or they might simply announce whenever they are entering and leaving the intersection. If these messages were communicated in natural language, it would be straightforward to determine which strategy was being employed. However, DCP agents instead communicate with an automatically induced protocol of unstructured, real-valued recurrent state vectors—an artificial language we might call “neuralese,” which superficially bears little resemblance to natural language, and thus frustrates attempts at direct interpretation. We propose to understand neuralese messages by translating them. In this work, we present a simple technique for inducing a dictionary that maps between neuralese message vectors and short natural language strings, given only examples of DCP agents interacting with other agents, and humans interacting with other humans. Natural language already provides a rich set of tools for describing beliefs, observations, and plans—our thesis is that these tools provide a useful complement to the visualization and ablation techniques used in previous work on understanding complex models BIBREF4 , BIBREF5 . While structurally quite similar to the task of machine translation between pairs of human languages, interpretation of neuralese poses a number of novel challenges. First, there is no natural source of parallel data: there are no bilingual “speakers” of both neuralese and natural language. Second, there may not be a direct correspondence between the strategy employed by humans and DCP agents: even if it were constrained to communicate using natural language, an automated agent might choose to produce a different message from humans in a given state. We tackle both of these challenges by appealing to the grounding of messages in gameplay. Our approach is based on one of the core insights in natural language semantics: messages (whether in neuralese or natural language) have similar meanings when they induce similar beliefs about the state of the world. Based on this intuition, we introduce a translation criterion that matches neuralese messages with natural language strings by minimizing statistical distance in a common representation space of distributions over speaker states. We explore several related questions: Our translation model and analysis are general, and in fact apply equally to human–computer and human–human translation problems grounded in gameplay. In this paper, we focus our experiments specifically on the problem of interpreting communication in deep policies, and apply our approach to the driving game in fig:teaser and two reference games of the kind shown in fig:bird-examples. We find that this approach outperforms a more conventional machine translation criterion both when attempting to interoperate with neuralese speakers and when predicting their state.

Question: What dataset is used?
Answer: XKCD color dataset; Caltech-UCSD Birds dataset; game data from Amazon Mechanical Turk workers