A Combinatorial Approach to Neural Emergent Communication

Zheyuan Zhang


Abstract
Substantial research on deep learning-based emergent communication uses the referential game framework, specifically the Lewis signaling game, however we argue that successful communication in this game typically only need one or two symbols for target image classification because of a sampling pitfall in the training data. To address this issue, we provide a theoretical analysis and introduce a combinatorial algorithm SolveMinSym (SMS) to solve the symbolic complexity for classification, which is the minimum number of symbols in the message for successful communication. We use the SMS algorithm to create datasets with different symbolic complexity to empirically show that data with higher symbolic complexity increases the number of effective symbols in the emergent language.
Anthology ID:
2025.coling-main.112
Volume:
Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Month:
January
Year:
2025
Address:
Abu Dhabi, UAE
Editors:
Owen Rambow, Leo Wanner, Marianna Apidianaki, Hend Al-Khalifa, Barbara Di Eugenio, Steven Schockaert
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1660–1666
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.112/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Zheyuan Zhang. 2025. A Combinatorial Approach to Neural Emergent Communication. In Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 1660–1666, Abu Dhabi, UAE. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
A Combinatorial Approach to Neural Emergent Communication (Zhang, COLING 2025)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.112.pdf