EMERGENCE OF LINGUISTIC COMMUNICATION FROM REFERENTIAL GAMES WITH SYMBOLIC AND PIXEL INPUT
The ability of algorithms to evolve or learn (compositional) communication protocols has traditionally been studied in the language evolution literature through the use of emergent communication tasks. Here we scale up this research by using contemporary deep learning methods and by training reinforcement-learning neural network agents on referential communication games. We extend previous work, in which agents were trained in symbolic environments, by developing agents which are able to learn from raw pixel data, a more challenging and realistic input representation. We find that the degree of structure found in the input data affects the nature of the emerged protocols, and thereby corroborate the hypothesis that structured compositional language is most likely to emerge when agents perceive the world as being structured.
--------------
Summary:
--------------
This paper presents a series of experiments on language emergence through referential games between two agents. They ground these experiments in both fully-specified symbolic worlds and through raw, entangled, visual observations of simple synthetic scenes. They provide rich analysis of the emergent languages the agents produce under different experimental conditions. This analysis (especially on raw pixel images) make up the primary contribution of this work.
--------------
Evaluation:
--------------
Overall I think the paper makes some interesting contributions with respect to the line of recent 'language emergence' papers. The authors provide novel analysis of the learned languages and perceptual system across a number of environmental settings, coming to the (perhaps uncontroversial) finding that varying the environment and restrictions on language result in variations in the learned communication protocols. 
In the context of existing literature, the novelty of this work is somewhat limited -- consisting primarily of the extension of multi-agent reference games to raw-pixel inputs. While this is a non-trivial extension, other works have demonstrated language learning in similar referring-expression contexts (essentially modeling only the listener model [Hermann et.al 2017]). 
I have a number of requests for clarification in the weaknesses section which I think would improve my understanding of this work and result in a stronger submission if included by the authors.  
--------------
Strengths:
--------------
- Clear writing and document structure. 
- Extensive experimental setting tweaks which ablate the information and regularity available to the agents. The discussion of the resulting languages is appropriate and provides some interesting insights.
- A number of novel analyses are presented to evaluate the learned languages and perceptual systems. 
--------------
Weaknesses:
--------------
- How stable are the reported trends / languages across multiple runs within the same experimental setting? The variance of REINFORCE policy gradients (especially without a baseline) plus the general stochasticity of SGD on randomly initialized networks leads me to believe that multiple training runs of these agents might result is significantly different codes / performance. I am interested in hearing the author's experiences in this regard and if multiple runs present similar quantitative and qualitative results. I admit that expecting identical codes is unrealistic, but the form of the codes (i.e. primarily encoding position) might be consistent even if the individual mappings are not).
- I don't recall seeing descriptions of the inference-time procedure used to evaluate training / test accuracy. I will assume argmax decoding for both speaker and listener. Please clarify or let me know if I missed something.
- There is ambiguity in how the "protocol size" metric is computed. In Table 1, it is defined as 'the effective number of unique message used'. This comes back to my question about decoding I suppose, but does this count the 'inference-time' messages or those produced during training? 
Furthermore, Table 2 redefines "protocol size" as the percentage of novel message. I assume this is an editing error given the values presented and take these columns as counts. It also seems "protocol size" is replaced with the term "lexicon" from 4.1 onward.
- I'm surprised by how well the agents generalize in the raw pixel data experiments. In fact, it seems that across all games the test accuracy remains very close to the train accuracy. 
Given the dataset is created by taking all combinations of color / shape and then sampling 100 location / floor color variations, it is unlikely that a shape / color combo has not been seen in training. Such that the only novel variations are likely location and floor color. However, taking Game A as an example, the probe classifiers are relatively poor at these attributes -- indicating the speaker's representation is not capturing these attributes well. Then how do the agents effectively differentiate so well between 20 images leveraging primarily color and shape?
I think some additional analysis of this setting might shed some light on this issue. One thought is to compute upper-bounds based on ground truth attributes. Consider a model which knows shape perfectly, but cannot predict other attributes beyond chance. To compute the performance of such a model, you could take the candidate set, remove any instances not matching the ground truth shape, and then pick randomly from the remaining instances. Something similar could be repeated for all attributes independently as well as their combinations -- obviously culminating in 100% accuracy given all 4. It could be that by dataset construction, object location and shape are sufficient to achieve high accuracy because the odds of seeing the same shape at the same location (but different color) is very low. 
Given these are operations on annotations and don't require time-consuming model training, I hope to see this analysis in the rebuttal to put the results into appropriate context.
- What is random chance for the position and floor color probe classifiers? I don't think it is mentioned how many locations / floor colors are used in generation.  
- Relatively minor complaint: Both agents are trained via the REINFORCE policy gradient update rule; however, the listener agent makes a fairly standard classification decision and could be trained with a standard cross-entropy loss. That is to say, the listener policy need not make intermediate discrete policy decisions. This decision to withhold available supervision is not discussed in the paper (as far as I noticed), could the authors speak to this point?
--------------
Curiosities:
--------------
- I got the impression from the results (specifically the lack of discussion about message length) that in these experiments agents always issued full length messages even though they did not need to do so. If true, could the authors give some intuition as to why? If untrue, what sort of distribution of lengths do you observe?
- There is no long term planning involved in this problem, so why use reinforcement learning over some sort of differentiable sampler? With some re-parameterization (i.e. Gumbel-Softmax), this model could be end-to-end differentiable.
--------------
Minor errors:
--------------
[2.2 paragraph 1] LSTM citation should not be in inline form.
[3 paragraph 1] 'Note that these representations do care some' -> carry
[3.3.1 last paragraph] 'still able comprehend' --> to
-------
Edit
-------
Updating rating from 6 to 7.