# Emergence of Compositional Language with Deep Generational Transmission

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1904.09067 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09067/

## Key facts

- Cited by 17 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 19 Apr 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [Emergent Communication: Generalization and Overfitting in Lewis Games](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.15342/) (2022)
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- [Linking Emergent and Natural Languages via Corpus Transfer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13344/) (2022)
- [Iterated Learning Improves Compositionality in Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.02145/) (2024)
- [A Review of the Applications of Deep Learning-Based Emergent Communication](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.03302/) (2024)
- [The Emergence of the Shape Bias Results from Communicative Efficiency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.06232/) (2021)
- [Towards More Human-like AI Communication: A Review of Emergent Communication Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.02541/) (2023)
- [Catalytic Role Of Noise And Necessity Of Inductive Biases In The Emergence Of Compositional Communication](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06464/) (2021)
- [Dynamic population-based meta-learning for multi-agent communication with natural language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.14241/) (2021)
- [Referential communication in heterogeneous communities of pre-trained visual deep networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.08913/) (2023)
- [Language Evolution with Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.11958/) (2024)
- [Models of symbol emergence in communication: a conceptual review and a guide for avoiding local minima](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.04544/) (2023)
- [A Combinatorial Approach to Neural Emergent Communication](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.18806/) (2024)
- [Compositionality Through Language Transmission, using Artificial Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.11739/) (2021)
- [Symbol emergence as interpersonal cross-situational learning: the emergence of lexical knowledge with combinatoriality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.15837/) (2023)
- [Emergent Communication for Rules Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.04474/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent work has studied the emergence of language among deep reinforcement learning agents that must collaborate to solve a task. Of particular interest are the factors that cause language to be compositional -- i.e., express meaning by combining words which themselves have meaning. Evolutionary linguists have found that in addition to structural priors like those already studied in deep learning, the dynamics of transmitting language from generation to generation contribute significantly to the emergence of compositionality. In this paper, we introduce these cultural evolutionary dynamics into language emergence by periodically replacing agents in a population to create a knowledge gap, implicitly inducing cultural transmission of language. We show that this implicit cultural transmission encourages the resulting languages to exhibit better compositional generalization.