{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/emergent-communication-generalization-and","title":"Emergent Communication: Generalization and Overfitting in Lewis Games","arxiv_id":"2209.15342","date":"2022-09-30","proceeding":null,"authors":["Mathieu Rita","Corentin Tallec","Paul Michel","Jean-bastien Grill","Olivier Pietquin","Emmanuel Dupoux","Florian Strub"],"abstract":"Lewis signaling games are a class of simple communication games for simulating the emergence of language. In these games, two agents must agree on a communication protocol in order to solve a cooperative task. Previous work has shown that agents trained to play this game with reinforcement learning tend to develop languages that display undesirable properties from a linguistic point of view (lack of generalization, lack of compositionality, etc). In this paper, we aim to provide better understanding of this phenomenon by analytically studying the learning problem in Lewis games. As a core contribution, we demonstrate that the standard objective in Lewis games can be decomposed in two components: a co-adaptation loss and an information loss. This decomposition enables us to surface two potential sources of overfitting, which we show may undermine the emergence of a structured communication protocol. In particular, when we control for overfitting on the co-adaptation loss, we recover desired properties in the emergent languages: they are more compositional and generalize better.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2209.15342v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2209.15342v2.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"emergent-communication-generalization-and","repo_url":"https://github.com/mathieurita/population","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"pytorch","reach":{"status":"ok","spdx":"MIT"}}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2209.15342","mcp":{"get_harvested_code_for_paper":{"arxiv_id":"2209.15342"}},"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers","read_at":"2026-09-24T18:15:14+00:00","read_at_is":"when the build read Syntology's graph, not when any sample ran","claim":"Per-sample execution status on synthesized fixtures; not a correctness claim about the paper. Samples come from repositories linked to the paper, official or community; repo_kind says which.","repos":[{"provenance":"deterministic:regex_extraction","url":"https://github.com/MathieuRita/Population","reach":{"status":"ok","spdx":"MIT"}},{"provenance":"external:paperswithcode_snapshot_2025-07-28","url":"https://github.com/mathieurita/population","reach":{"status":"ok","spdx":"MIT"}}],"summary":{"ran_draft_wrong":1},"by_repo_kind":{},"repo_kind_vocabulary":{"official":"The archive marks this repository official for the paper","named_in_paper":"The archive records that the paper mentions this repository; it is not marked official","listed":"In the archive's code links for this paper, not marked official and not recorded as mentioned in the paper","found_in_text":"Syntology found this repository in the paper's own text; whether it is the authors' implementation is not asserted","community":"Not in the archive's code links for this paper; a community repository Syntology harvested"},"n_pointer_only_for_licence":1,"samples":[{"code_sha256_prefix":"1ff2e1e339d9123b","entry":"get_params","repo":null,"repo_kind":null,"path":null,"file_url":null,"link_basis":"identical_code_first_harvested_elsewhere","language":"python","status":"ran_draft_wrong","verification_level":1,"contract_check":"OUTPUT_MISDECLARED","metamorphic_tier":"deterministic","behaviour_fingerprint":false,"licence":null,"inline_ok":false,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"1ff2e1e339d9123b"}}]},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}