Emergent Communication for Co-constructed Emotion Between Embodied Agents via Collective Predictive Coding

The theory of constructed emotion defines social reality as the community-level consensus on emotion concepts assigned to interoceptive sensations arising from bodily allostasis and social interaction. In this study, we simulate this emergence process using a computational model that integrates symbol emergence with degrees of freedom in symbol interpretation and active inference. Two agents receive interoceptive signals, exchange inferred symbols, and simultaneously adapt their bodily control goals and symbol interpretations to each other. Experimental results show that the interoceptive prior preferences and symbol probability distributions of the two agents converge, confirming the emergence of social reality grounded in social consensus.

Inter-brain synchrony (IBS) observed in real-time dyadic interactions, including parent-infant exchanges, suggests that two agents can align their internal representations through interaction. Yet computational accounts of how such alignment can arise between agents that have only local sensory access and asymmetric internal knowledge remain underdeveloped. We propose a constructive model of parent-infant homeostatic co-regulation that integrates a POMDP formulation of active interoceptive inference with the Metropolis-Hastings Naming Game (MHNG) derived from the Collective Predictive Coding (CPC) hypothesis. In our model, the parent and infant agents agree on homeostatic regulatory actions for the infant's visceral state through a shared communicative variable generated by a locally computable Metropolis-Hastings probability. The parent observes the infant through body-generated exteroceptive cues, whereas the infant directly senses its own visceral state through interoception. This difference in access modality is implemented as asymmetric generative-model knowledge: the parent knows how actions transform visceral states but must learn what the infant's bodily cues indicate, whereas the infant perceives its visceral state directly but must learn how actions affect it. We quantify the degree of representational alignment using the Jensen-Shannon divergence between the two agents' latent representations. Notably, this synchrony emerged far earlier than the generative-model convergence and was maintained despite heterogeneous generative-model knowledge, indicating that it does not require fully shared world models. These findings support CPC as a candidate computational framework for explaining how dynamic representational synchrony relevant to IBS can emerge through local interactions.

Symbols are shared, but perception is private. We study emergent communication between heterogeneous visual agents through decentralized learning, asking what visual information can become shareable when agents have different visual representations. Instead of optimizing messages through a shared external communicative objective, our agents exchange only discrete token sequences and update their own models using local perceptual evidence. This setting focuses on an underexplored aspect of emergent communication, examining whether common symbols can arise without shared perceptual access, and how the similarity between private visual spaces constrains the content and symmetry of the resulting language. We instantiate this setting in the Metropolis-Hastings Captioning Game (MHCG), where two agents collaboratively form shared captions by exchanging proposed token sequences that a listener accepts or rejects using an MH-style criterion evaluated against its own visual features. We compare three pairings of frozen visual encoders, with agents starting from randomly initialized text modules. Experiments on MS-COCO show that MHCG produces visually informative shared token sequences that outperform a no-communication baseline in cross-agent alignment, visual-feature prediction, and image-text retrieval; all cross-agent metrics decline as encoder mismatch increases. Moderate encoder heterogeneity reduces the number of shared sequences while preserving per-sequence visual specificity, whereas stronger encoder heterogeneity yields fewer, coarser, and more asymmetric sequences. Ablations show that listener-side MH acceptance is critical for avoiding degenerate token formation. These results suggest that shared symbols can arise from local perceptual evaluation alone, with visual representational similarity across encoders shaping both the content and symmetry of the resulting language.