Emergent Communication

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Overview

Emergent communication studies how agents with limited or different observations invent signals to coordinate, describe shared worlds, and establish conventions without a fully specified language. Researchers use signaling and referential games, multi-agent reinforcement learning, evolutionary simulations, and interactions among humans or language-model agents; they evaluate task success, compositionality, transfer, and interpretability. Methods such as iterated learning, vector quantization, information bottlenecks, and prompt optimization shape messages and test their robustness under bandwidth limits. A central tension is that protocols can work well within a pair yet fail across agents, seeds, or settings, and more communication is not always useful when agents already share information through their environment.

Latest papers

CardsList

30 papers4 papers in the last four weeks, down 20% on the four weeks before. 0.0% of all new papers.

  1. A Heart Means Recursion: Exploring Visual Meaning and Communication in VLMs

    Oct 27, 2026Alexa R. Tartaglini, Zhengxuan Wu, Thaddäus Wiedemer +3Emergent CommunicationVLM Interpretability

    Google DeepMind · Stanford University

  2. The value of information and the emergence of communication in evolved e-puck robots

    Oct 9, 2026Fernando Montes-GonzalezMulti-Agent CommunicationEmergent Communication

    Instituto de Investigaciones en Inteligencia Artificial, Universidad Veracruzana, Mexico

  3. Behavioral Persistence and Incomplete Functional Transfer of Co-evolved Communication in Evolutionary Robotics

    Sep 29, 2026Fernando Montes-GonzalezSim-to-Real TransferMulti-Robot Coordination

    Universidad Veracruzana, Mexico

  4. Attention-based Hierarchical Variational Information Bottleneck for Robust Multi-Agent Communication under Variable Bandwidth

    Sep 28, 2026Lukas Koch Vindbjerg, Qi Zhang, Yury Brodskiy +1Information BottleneckMulti-Agent Communication

    Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark · EIVA a/s, Denmark · DIGIT, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark

  5. Emergence, Not Bandwidth: Physical Coupling and the Limits of Learned Multi-Agent Communication

    Sep 28, 2026Mihir Chauhan, Aniket BeraSequential MARLPartially Observable Markov Decision Processes

    IDEAS Lab, Department of Computer Science Purdue University

  6. Communication between Frozen Large Language Models via Prompt Optimization in a Referential Game

    Sep 25, 2026Vivek Anand, Muthu Chandrasekaran, Shiva ChaitanyaEmergent CommunicationLLM Prompting

    School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA · Work done while at Interactly.ai

  7. For Your Eyes Only: Evaluating Coordination Between Isolated Language Model Instances

    Sep 16, 2026Alexander Shirnin, Aleksey KudelyaDeception in Language ModelsLLM Security

  8. The Convention Gap: Beyond Literal Content in Human-AI Cooperation

    Sep 10, 2026Makoto Fukushima, Hua-Dong Xiong, Ehsan Moradi PariGame-Playing AgentsAI Agent Evaluation

    Honda Research Institute Japan · Honda Research Institute USA

  9. Portable Semantics, Private Dialects: Reuse and Negative Transfer in Latent Communication Between Language-Model Cells

    Sep 10, 2026Narcis MarincatMulti-Agent CommunicationNegative Transfer

    Independent researcher.

  10. GlossoGen: Emergent Language in Complex Multi-Agent LLM Interactions

    Sep 1, 2026Elias Stengel-Eskin, Newton Sander, Carlos Bonetti +4Multi-Agent LLMsEmergent Communication

    University of Texas at Austin · AE Studio · Schmidt Sciences +1

  11. The rise and evolution of a referential code in populations of bee-like agents

    Aug 26, 2026Grzegorz ChrupałaEmergent Communication

  12. EmCom-Diffusion: Probing Visual Reflection in Emergent Languages via Image Generation

    Jul 4, 2026Haruumi Omoto, Tadahiro TaniguchiEmergent Communication

    Graduate School of Informatics, Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan · Research Organization of Science and Technology, Ritsumeikan University, Shiga, Japan

  13. From Signals to Structure: How Memory Architecture Drives Language Emergence in LLM Agents

    Jun 30, 2026Yashar Talebirad, Eden Redman, Ali Parsaee +1Multi-Agent LLM SystemsMulti-Agent Coordination

    Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada · Network for Applied Technology, Edmonton, Canada

  14. Drawing with Strangers: Population Scaling Drives Zero-Shot Mutual Intelligibility in Emergent Sketching

    Jun 9, 2026Jooyeon KimZero-Shot LearningEmergent Communication

    Graduate School of Artificial Intelligence UNIST

  15. Emergent Language as an Approach to Conscious AI

    Jun 4, 2026Zengqing Wu, Chuan XiaoMachine ConsciousnessEmergent Communication

    University of Osaka

  16. Self-Regulation through Communication in Evolved Neural Agents

    Jun 1, 2026Joshua NunleyMulti-Agent CommunicationEmergent Communication

    Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, USA

  17. SCALE-COMM: Shared, Contrastively-Aligned Latent Embeddings for MARL Communication

    May 26, 2026Mahmoud Abouelyazid, Eman HammadMulti-Robot CoordinationDecentralized MARL

    Electrical and Computer Engineering Department Texas A&M University, College Station, TX, USA

  18. Emergent Communication between Heterogeneous Visual Agents through Decentralized Learning

    May 12, 2026Mikako Ochiai, Masatoshi Nagano, Tadahiro TaniguchiMulti-Agent SystemsVision-Language Alignment

    Graduate School of Informatics, Kyoto University, Kyoto 606-8501, Japan

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

    May 10, 2026Zehang Zhang, Nguyen Le Hoang, Tadahiro Taniguchi +1Computational Cognitive ModelingPredictive Coding

    Graduate School of Engineering Science, The University of Osaka, Toyonaka 560-8531, Japan · Graduate School of Informatics, Kyoto University, Kyoto 606-8501, Japan

  20. Generalization Bounds of Emergent Communications for Agentic AI Networking

    May 9, 2026Yong Xiao, Jingxuan Chai, Guangming Shi +16G NetworksInformation Bottleneck

    School of Elect. Inform. & Commun., Huazhong Univ. of Science & Technology, China · School of Artificial Intelligence, Xidian University, Xi’an, China · Peng Cheng Laboratory, Shenzhen, China +1

  21. Emergence of Social Reality of Emotion through a Social Allostasis Model with Dynamic Interpretants

    May 8, 2026Kentaro Nomura, Yushi Tsubamoto, Takato HoriiComputational Cognitive ModelingEmergent Communication

    Graduate School of Engineering Science The University of Osaka · Graduate School of Medicine The University of Osaka

  22. SANEmerg: An Emergent Communication Framework for Semantic-aware Agentic AI Networking

    May 7, 2026Yong Xiao, Haoran Zhou, Yujie Zhou +1Agent Communication ProtocolsSemantic Communication

    School of Elect. Inform. & Commun., Huazhong Univ. of Science & Technology, China · Peng Cheng Laboratory, Shenzhen, China · Pazhou Laboratory (Huangpu), Guangzhou, China +1

  23. Modeling Human-Like Color Naming Behavior in Context

    Apr 28, 2026Yuqing Zhang, Ecesu Ürker, Tessa Verhoef +2Computational PsycholinguisticsEmergent Communication

    Center for Language and Cognition, University of Groningen · Department of Translation and Language Sciences, Universitat Pompeu Fabra · Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science, Leiden University +1

  24. Math Takes Two: A test for emergent mathematical reasoning in communication

    Mar 30, 2026Michael Cooper, Samuel CooperMathematical Reasoning BenchmarksLLM Mathematical Reasoning

    Cooper Cognitive

  25. Emergent Compositional Communication for Latent World Properties

    Mar 18, 2026Tomek KaszyńskiEmergent CommunicationCompositional Representation Learning

    Independent Researcher, Amsterdam, Netherlands

  26. Principled Learning-to-Communicate with Quasi-Classical Information Structures

    Mar 4, 2026Xiangyu Liu, Haoyi You, Kaiqing ZhangMulti-Agent CommunicationDecentralized MARL

    University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA, 20742

  27. CoCre-Sam (Kokkuri-san): Modeling Ouija Board as Collective Langevin Dynamics Sampling from Fused Language Models

    Jul 16, 2025Tadahiro Taniguchi, Masatoshi Nagano, Haruumi Omoto +1Emergent CommunicationLarge Language Model-Based Social Simulation

    Graduate School of Informatics, Kyoto University, Japan · Ritsumeikan University, Japan · University of Reading, UK

  28. Co-Creative Learning via Metropolis-Hastings Interaction between Humans and AI

    Jun 18, 2025Ryota Okumura, Tadahiro Taniguchi, Akira Taniguchi +1Human-AI Co-CreationHuman-AI Agreement

    Ritsumeikan University · Kyoto University · Soka University

  29. VQEL: Enabling Self-Play in Emergent Language Games via Agent-Internal Vector Quantization

    Mar 6, 2025Mohammad Mahdi Samiei Paqaleh, Mehdi Jamalkhah, Mahdieh Soleymani BaghshahEmergent Communication

    Department of Computer Engineering, Sharif University of Technology · School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Tehran

  30. ETHER: Aligning Emergent Communication for Hindsight Experience Replay

    Jul 28, 2023Kevin Yandoka Denamganaï, Daniel Hernandez, Ozan Vardal +2Reinforcement LearningExperience Replay

    Department of Computer Science University of York York, UK