Referential communication in heterogeneous communities of pre-trained visual deep networks

As large pre-trained image-processing neural networks are being embedded in autonomous agents such as self-driving cars or robots, the question arises of how such systems can communicate with each other about the surrounding world, despite their different architectures and training regimes. As a first step in this direction, we systematically explore the task of referential communication in a community of heterogeneous state-of-the-art pre-trained visual networks, showing that they can develop, in a self-supervised way, a shared protocol to refer to a target object among a set of candidates. This shared protocol can also be used, to some extent, to communicate about previously unseen object categories of different granularity. Moreover, a visual network that was not initially part of an existing community can learn the community's protocol with remarkable ease. Finally, we study, both qualitatively and quantitatively, the properties of the emergent protocol, providing some evidence that it is capturing high-level semantic features of objects.