text:   communication",10,"['New (ICLR) paper out on arXiv! 🥳 We started with the question ""how do you go from emergent communication to natural language?"", and ended up here: <LINK>\n\nSpoiler: emergent communication may not be super useful for NLP, but self-play can be. \n\nThread 👇: (1/n) <LINK>', 'Back in 2017 when interning at OpenAI and working on multi-agent RL, @j_foerst and I came up with an idea. what if we: \n\n(1) trained a *population* of agents via emergent communication, and then \n\n(2) trained a *meta-agent* to adapt to all these populations? (2/n)', 'The hope would be that after (2), you had an agent that can quickly learn new languages, and could hopefully learn English with fewer samples (probably with appropriate conditions on the initial distribution over languages) (3/n)', ""@backpropper and I finally started working on this in early 2019. Initial results weren't promising: even in a  simple game with an artificial compositional language (the 'target language'), it was hard for the agents to emerge languages that were useful for the meta-agent (4/n)"", '(Although if you pre-defined the set of emergent languages to train on, it worked okay. See our early workshop submission here: https://t.co/3ml6ukO6RR, which also reveals how we were thinking about it at the time.) (5/n)', 'We eventually realized that if you first did a bit of supervised learning on the target language (which is feasible in practice), things worked a lot better. \n\nSo our focus shifted towards: ""how do we combine supervised learning + self-play for language learning?"" (6/n)', ""The conclusion: it seems like (in our games) it's not actually a good idea to emerge a language from scratch! \n\nInstead, better to start with some supervised learning, then put some self-play updates in. (7/n)"", 'This is maybe obvious in retrospect, but for me it was surprising, since one of my main motivations for working on emergent communication was that it could be a way to get really good natural language-using agents. (8/n)', ""So I'm now less optimistic on emergent communication as a path to good NLP, though I think self-play could still be a very useful signal to use in some cases. (9/n)"", 'All of this is joint work with the fantastic @backpropper, @j_foerst, @douwekiela, and Joelle Pineau. 👃 (n/n)']",20,02,2216