Emergent Communication with Attention
Ryokan Ri Ryo Ueda Jason Naradowsky
To develop computational agents that better communicate using their own
emergent language, we endow the agents with an ability to focus their attention
on particular concepts in the environment. Humans often understand an object or
scene as a composite of concepts and those concepts are further mapped onto
words. We implement this intuition as cross-modal attention mechanisms in
Speaker and Listener agents in a referential game and show attention leads to
more compositional and interpretable emergent language. We also demonstrate how
attention aids in understanding the learned communication protocol by
investigating the attention weights associated with each message symbol and the
alignment of attention weights between Speaker and Listener agents. Overall,
our results suggest that attention is a promising mechanism for developing more
human-like emergent language.