Reproduce “Exploring Zero-Shot Emergent Communication in Embodied Multi-Agent Populations” on OpenResearch

About this paper

Kalesha Bullard, Franziska Meier, Douwe Kiela, Joelle Pineau, Jakob Foerster

Embodied agents can learn emergent communication protocols that generalize zero-shot to unseen partners by leveraging universal physical constraints such as energy expenditure and non-uniform intent distributions. This approach enabled near-perfect zero-shot coordination for two intents when an observer was explicitly provided with latent energy features, moving beyond symbolic "cheap-talk" channels.

Key insights

• Universal physical constraints, specifically energy cost and non-uniform intent distributions, can serve as grounding for emergent communication protocols that facilitate zero-shot generalization.
• The discovery or explicit provision of this induced latent structure (e.g., energy values) to the observer is critical for achieving robust zero-shot coordination, especially as task complexity increases.
• Optimizing for continuous-action, generalizable communication protocols in high-dimensional spaces is challenging due to non-convexity, sender-receiver lock-in, and the combinatorial problem of ordering continuous features.

Summary by alphaXiv.