Emergent Communication: New Frontiers

Emergent Communication (EC) studies learning to communicate by interacting with other agents to solve collaborative tasks. There is a long history of EC for linguistics and the study of language evolution but following deep learning breakthroughs, there has been an explosion in deep EC research. Early work focused on learning more complex and effective protocols for MARL but recent research has expanded scope: inductive biases, population structures, measurements, and evolutionary biology. In parallel, new research has used EC and its paradigm for practical applications in NLP, video games, and even networking. EC has significant potential to impact a wide range of disciplines both within AI (e.g. MARL, visual-question answering, explainability, robotics) and beyond (e.g. social linguistics, cognitive science, philosophy of language) so the goal of this workshop is to push the boundaries of EC as a field and methodology. To achieve this, we are proposing a novel, discussion-focused workshop format and assembling speakers from ML to CogSci to Philosophy and the Arts. Our goal is to create a space for an interdisciplinary community, open new frontiers, and foster future research collaboration.