Call for Papers

2nd NeurIPS Workshop on Emergent Communication [EmComm2]


Submission via https://cmt3.research.microsoft.com/EMECOMNIPS2018

Website: https://sites.google.com/site/emecom2018/

Sat Dec 8th 08:45 AM -- 06:30 PM, Montreal, Canada

Abstract

Communication is one of the most impressive human abilities. The question of how communication arises has been studied for many decades, if not centuries. However, due to computational and representational limitations, past work was restricted to low dimensional, simple observation spaces. With the rise of deep reinforcement learning, this question can now be studied in complex multi-agent settings, which has led to flourishing activities in the area over the past years. In these settings, agents learn to communicate in grounded multimodal environments using rich, emergent communication protocols.

Last year’s workshop was a great success, but there still are many open questions. For example, most work in the field so far has focused on fully cooperative settings, while the more challenging and realistic use cases come from situations where agents do not have fully aligned interests and goals. How can we have credible communication amongst self-interested agents where each agent maximizes its own individual rewards rather than a joint team reward? This is a new computational modeling challenge for the community.

Due to the recent exploding popularity of machine learning, there is a tendency for researchers to have an arguably too narrow focus only on recent machine learning-based approaches. This often leads to reinventing the wheel. In order to avoid this issue and broaden our view on emergent communication, we take an interdisciplinary approach to emergent communication by inviting scientists from a broad set of disciplines, including machine learning, game theory, evolutionary biology, linguistics, cognitive science and programming languages, while focusing on the question of communication and emergent language.

Call for Papers

We invite submissions in the following and related areas:

  • deep multi-agent learning
  • language evolution
  • multi-agent communication
  • strategic communication
  • modeling of other agents
  • understanding emergent protocols
  • grounding emergent protocols
  • Any other area related to the subject of the workshop

All accepted submissions will be made available on the workshop website and included in the poster session during the workshop. As this does not constitute an archival publication or formal proceedings, authors are free to submit and publish their extended work elsewhere.

Since NIPS sold out early, authors of accepted papers at the workshop may be able to register for the workshop through access to a dedicated pool of tickets.

Submission Format

An abstract should be 2-4 pages of content in the NeurIPS format, with an unlimited number of pages for references. We also encourage the submission of a recently published, accepted or submitted paper, without any page limit and without restrictions on the format. Submissions do not need to be double blind.

Submissions Link

Please submit your manuscripts via: https://cmt3.research.microsoft.com/EMECOMNIPS2018

Important Dates

Submission Deadline: Nov 2 2018

Author Notification: Nov 18 2018

Workshop: Dec 8 2018