# Ad hoc conventions generalize to new referents

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.05566 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.05566/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 18 of its 75 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 Sep 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 18 of 18)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [Open Problems in Cooperative AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.08630/) (2020)
- [Latent Space Translation via Semantic Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.00664/) (2023)
- [The PhotoBook Dataset: Building Common Ground through Visually-Grounded Dialogue](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.01530/) (2019)
- [Abstract Visual Reasoning with Tangram Shapes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.16492/) (2022)
- [Characterizing the dynamics of learning in repeated reference games](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.07199/) (2019)
- [Continual adaptation for efficient machine communication](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.09896/) (2019)
- [From partners to populations: A hierarchical Bayesian account of coordination and convention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.05857/) (2021)
- [Refer, Reuse, Reduce: Generating Subsequent References in Visual and Conversational Contexts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.04554/) (2020)
- [Continual Learning for Instruction Following from Realtime Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09710/) (2022)
- [Empirica: a virtual lab for high-throughput macro-level experiments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11398/) (2020)
- [Modeling Open-World Cognition as On-Demand Synthesis of Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.12547/) (2025)
- [Constrained Human-AI Cooperation: An Inclusive Embodied Social Intelligence Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.01796/) (2024)
- [Maintaining Common Ground in Dynamic Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.14207/) (2021)
- [Language-Informed Synthesis of Rational Agent Models for Grounded Theory-of-Mind Reasoning On-The-Fly](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.16755/) (2025)
- [Shades of confusion: Lexical uncertainty modulates ad hoc coordination in an interactive communication task](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.06546/) (2021)
- [The Universal Law of Generalization Holds for Naturalistic Stimuli](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.08564/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

How do people talk about things they've never talked about before? One view suggests that a new shared naming system establishes an arbitrary link to a specific target, like proper names that cannot extend beyond their bearers. An alternative view proposes that forming a shared way of describing objects involves broader conceptual alignment, reshaping each individual's semantic space in ways that should generalize to new referents. We test these competing accounts in a dyadic communication study (N=302) leveraging the recently-released KiloGram dataset containing over 1,000 abstract tangram images. After pairs of participants coordinated on referential conventions for one set of images through repeated communication, we measured the extent to which their descriptions aligned for undiscussed images. We found strong evidence for generalization: partners showed increased alignment relative to their pre-test labels. Generalization also decayed nonlinearly with visual similarity (consistent with Shepard's law) and was robust across levels of the images' nameability. These findings suggest that ad hoc conventions are not arbitrary labels but reflect genuine conceptual coordination, with implications for theories of reference and the design of more adaptive language agents.