{"pk":29728,"title":"Reinforcement of Semantic Representations in Pragmatic Agents Leads to theEmergence of a Mutual Exclusivity Bias","subtitle":null,"abstract":"We present a novel framework for building pragmatic artificialagents with explicit and trainable semantic representations, us-ing the Rational Speech Act model. We train our agents onsupervised and unsupervised communication games and com-pare their behavior to literal agents lacking pragmatic abilities.For both types of games pragmatic but not literal agents evolvea mutual exclusivity bias. This provides a computational prag-matic account of mutual exclusivity and points out a possi-ble direction for solving the mutual exclusivity bias challengeposed by Gandhi and Lake (2019). We find that pragmaticreasoning can cause the bias either by promoting lexical con-straints during learning, or by affecting online inference. In ad-dition we show that pragmatic abilities lead to faster learningand that this advantage is even stronger when meanings to becommunicated follow a more natural distribution as describedby Zipf’s law.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"mutual exclusivity; reinforcement learning; Ratio-nal Speech Act model; gradient-based learning"}],"section":"Poster Session 2","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7rh0d52r","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Xenia","middle_name":"","last_name":"Ohmer","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Osnabrueck","department":""},{"first_name":"Peter","middle_name":"","last_name":"Konig","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Osnabrueck","department":""},{"first_name":"Michael","middle_name":"","last_name":"Franke","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Osnabrueck","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2020-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/29728/galley/19585/download/"}]}