# Exploiting individual differences to bootstrap communication

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.05211 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.05211/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 5 of its 67 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Apr 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Learning Multiagent Communication with Backpropagation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.07736/) (2016)
- [Linguistic Structure from a Bottleneck on Sequential Information Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.12109/) (2024)
- [Word learning under infinite uncertainty](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.2487/) (2014)
- [Stochastic dynamics of lexicon learning in an uncertain and nonuniform world](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1302.5526/) (2013)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Establishing a communication system is hard because the intended meaning of a signal is unknown to its receiver when first produced, and the signaller also has no idea how that signal will be interpreted. Most theoretical accounts of the emergence of communication systems rely on feedback to reinforce behaviours that have led to successful communication in the past. However, providing such feedback requires already being able to communicate the meaning that was intended or interpreted. Therefore these accounts cannot explain how communication can be bootstrapped from non-communicative behaviours. Here we present a model that shows how a communication system, capable of expressing an unbounded number of meanings, can emerge as a result of individual behavioural differences in a large population without any pre-existing means to determine communicative success. The two key cognitive capabilities responsible for this outcome are behaving predictably in a given situation, and an alignment of psychological states ahead of signal production that derives from shared intentionality. Since both capabilities can exist independently of communication, our results are compatible with theories in which large flexible socially-learned communication systems like language are the product of a general but well-developed capacity for social cognition.