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Title: Emergence of Compositional Language with Deep Generational Transmission

Paper content:
Recent work has studied the emergence of language among deep reinforcement learning agents that must collaborate to solve a task.
Of particular interest are the factors that cause language to be compositional---i.e., express meaning by combining words which themselves have meaning.
Evolutionary linguists have found that in addition to structural priors like those already studied in deep learning, the dynamics of transmitting language from generation to generation contribute significantly to the emergence of  compositionality.
In this paper, we introduce these cultural evolutionary dynamics into language emergence by periodically replacing agents in a population to create a knowledge gap, implicitly inducing cultural transmission of language.
We show that this implicit cultural transmission encourages the resulting languages to exhibit better compositional generalization.
Compositionality is an important structure of language that reflects a disentangled understanding of the world -enabling the expression of infinitely many concepts using finitely many elements.
Agents that have compositional understandings of the world generalize in obviously correct ways even in the face of limited training examples (Lake & Baroni, 2018) .
For example, an agent with a compositional understanding of blue squares and purple triangles should also understand purple squares without directly observing any of them.
Developing artificial agents that can ground, understand, and produce compositional (and therefore more interpretable) language could greatly improve generalization to new instances and ease human-AI interactions.
In building theories of how compositionality emerges in human languages, work in evolutionary linguistics looks to the process of cultural transmission (Kirby, 2001; Kirby et al., 2008) .
Cultural transmission of language occurs when a group of agents pass their language on to a new group of agents, e.g. parents who teach their children to speak as they do.
Because this education is incomplete and biased, it allows the language itself to change over time via a process known as cultural evolution.
This paradigm (Kirby et al., 2014) explains the emergence of compositionality as a result of expressivity and compressibility -i.e. to be most effective, a language should be expressive enough to differentiate between all possible meanings (e.g., objects) and compressible enough to be learned easily.
Work in the evolutionary linguistics community has shown that over multiple 'generations' these competing pressures result in the emergence of compositional languages both in simulation (Kirby, 2001 ) and with human subjects (Kirby et al., 2008) .
These studies aim to understand humans whereas we want to understand and design artificial neural networks.
Approaching the problem from another direction, recent work in AI has studied language emergence in such multi-agent, goal-driven tasks.
These works have demonstrated that agent languages will emerge to enable coordination-centric tasks to be solved without direct or even indirect language supervision (Foerster et al., 2016; Sukhbaatar et al., 2016; Lazaridou et al., 2017; Das et al., 2017) .
However, the resulting languages are usually not compositional and are difficult to interpret, even by other machines (Andreas et al., 2017) .
Some existing work has studied means to encourage compositional language formation (Mordatch & Abbeel, 2018; , but these settings study fixed populations of agents -i.e. examining language within a single generation.
In this work we bridge these two areas -examining the effect of generational cultural transmission on the compositionality of emergent languages in a multi-agent, goal-driven setting.
We introduce cultural transmission into language emergence between neural agents.
The starting point of our study is a goal-oriented dialog task (similar to that of ), summarized in Fig. 1a .
During learning we periodically replace some agents with new ones (gray agents).
These new agents do not know any language, but instead of creating one they learn it from older agents.
This creates generations of language that become more compositional over time.
We study this in the context of a cooperative dialog-based reference game involving two agents communicating in discrete symbols ; an example dialog is shown in Fig. 1a .
To examine cultural transmission, we extend this setting to a population of agents (Fig. 1b) and introduce a simple mechanism to induce the expressivity and compressibility pressures inherent in cultural transmission.
Specifically, we periodically re-initialize some subset of the agents in the population.
In order to perform well at the task, the population's emergent language must be sufficiently expressive to reference all the objects (expressivity) and must be easily learnable by these 'new' agents (compressibility).
The new agents have a randomized language whereas the surviving agents already know a grounded language.
This "knowledge gap" creates an implicit 'teaching' setting that is analogous to the explicit transmission stage in models of iterative learning (Kirby, 2001 ).
Through our experiments and analysis, we show that periodic agent replacement is an effective way to induce cultural transmission and yields more compositionally generalizable language in our setting.
To summarize, our contributions are: -We propose a method for inducing implicit cultural transmission in neural language models.
-We introduce new metrics to measure the similarity between agent languages and verify cultural transmission has occurred as a result of our periodic agent replacement protocol.
-We show our cultural transmission procedure induces compositionality in neural language models, going from 13% accuracy on a compositionally novel test set to 46% in the best configuration.
Further, we show this is complementary with previous priors which encourage compositionality.
In this work we investigated cultural transmission in deep neural dialog agents, applying it to language emergence.
The evolutionary linguistics community has long used cultural transmission to explain how compositional languages could have emerged.
The deep learning community, having recently become interested in language emergence, has not investigated that link until now.
Instead of explicit models of cultural transmission familiar in evolutionary linguistics, we favor an implicit model where language is transmitted from generation to generation only because it helps agents achieve their goals.
We show that this does indeed cause cultural transmission and compositionality.
Future work.
While our work used an implicit version of cultural transmission, we are interested in investigating the effect of explicit versions of cultural transmission on language structure.
In another direction, cultural transmission may also provide an appropriate prior for neural representations of non-language information.

assistant: text: We use cultural transmission to encourage compositionality in languages that emerge from interactions between neural agents.