Part of Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 34 (NeurIPS 2021)
Łukasz Kuciński, Tomasz Korbak, Paweł Kołodziej, Piotr Miłoś
Communication is compositional if complex signals can be represented as a combination of simpler subparts. In this paper, we theoretically show that inductive biases on both the training framework and the data are needed to develop a compositional communication. Moreover, we prove that compositionality spontaneously arises in the signaling games, where agents communicate over a noisy channel. We experimentally confirm that a range of noise levels, which depends on the model and the data, indeed promotes compositionality. Finally, we provide a comprehensive study of this dependence and report results in terms of recently studied compositionality metrics: topographical similarity, conflict count, and context independence.