{"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/patchgame-learning-to-signal-mid-level","title":"PatchGame: Learning to Signal Mid-level Patches in Referential Games","arxiv_id":"2111.01785","date":"2021-11-02","proceeding":"NeurIPS 2021 12","authors":["Kamal Gupta","Gowthami Somepalli","Anubhav Gupta","Vinoj Jayasundara","Matthias Zwicker","Abhinav Shrivastava"],"abstract":"We study a referential game (a type of signaling game) where two agents communicate with each other via a discrete bottleneck to achieve a common goal. In our referential game, the goal of the speaker is to compose a message or a symbolic representation of \"important\" image patches, while the task for the listener is to match the speaker's message to a different view of the same image. We show that it is indeed possible for the two agents to develop a communication protocol without explicit or implicit supervision. We further investigate the developed protocol and show the applications in speeding up recent Vision Transformers by using only important patches, and as pre-training for downstream recognition tasks (e.g., classification). Code available at https://github.com/kampta/PatchGame.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2111.01785v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2111.01785v1.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":"patchgame-learning-to-signal-mid-level","repo_url":"https://github.com/kampta/patchgame","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"pytorch","reach":{"status":"ok","spdx":"Apache-2.0"}}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2111.01785","mcp":{"get_harvested_code_for_paper":{"arxiv_id":"2111.01785"}},"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":"external:paperswithcode_snapshot_2025-07-28","url":"https://github.com/kampta/patchgame","reach":{"status":"ok","spdx":"Apache-2.0"}}],"summary":{"ran_draft_wrong":2,"unverified":1},"by_repo_kind":{"official":{"samples":3,"ran":2,"repositories":1}},"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":0,"samples":[{"code_sha256_prefix":"253faf1dcc9bf28f","entry":"forward","repo":"kampta/PatchGame","repo_kind":"official","path":"eval_patchrank.py","file_url":"https://github.com/kampta/PatchGame/blob/HEAD/eval_patchrank.py","link_basis":"first_harvest_node","language":"python","status":"ran_draft_wrong","verification_level":1,"contract_check":"MISDECLARED","metamorphic_tier":"invariant","behaviour_fingerprint":false,"licence":"Apache-2.0","inline_ok":true,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"253faf1dcc9bf28f"}},{"code_sha256_prefix":"4bca1830407ab9b2","entry":"forward_features","repo":"kampta/PatchGame","repo_kind":"official","path":"eval_patchrank.py","file_url":"https://github.com/kampta/PatchGame/blob/HEAD/eval_patchrank.py","link_basis":"first_harvest_node","language":"python","status":"ran_draft_wrong","verification_level":1,"contract_check":"MISDECLARED","metamorphic_tier":"invariant","behaviour_fingerprint":false,"licence":"Apache-2.0","inline_ok":true,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"4bca1830407ab9b2"}},{"code_sha256_prefix":"ca39b9c099892e7f","entry":"knn_classifier","repo":"kampta/PatchGame","repo_kind":"official","path":"eval_knn.py","file_url":"https://github.com/kampta/PatchGame/blob/HEAD/eval_knn.py","link_basis":"first_harvest_node","language":"python","status":"unverified","verification_level":0,"contract_check":null,"metamorphic_tier":null,"behaviour_fingerprint":false,"licence":"Apache-2.0","inline_ok":true,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"ca39b9c099892e7f"}}]},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}