An agent who interacts with a wide population of other agents needs to be aware that there may be variations in their understanding of the world. Furthermore, the machinery which they use to perceive may be inherently different, as is the case between humans and machines. In this work, we present both an image reference game between a speaker and a population of listeners where reasoning about the concepts other agents can comprehend is necessary and a model formulation with this capability. We focus on reasoning about the conceptual understanding of others, as well as adapting to novel gameplay partners and dealing with differences in perceptual machinery. Our experiments on three benchmark image/attribute datasets suggest that our learner indeed encodes information directly pertaining to the understanding of other agents, and that leveraging this information is crucial for maximizing gameplay performance.

For a machine learning system to gain user trust, either its reasoning should to be transparent [Rudin, 2019, Freitas, 2014, Lakkaraju et al., 2016, Letham et al., 2015], or it should be capable of justifying

Summary --- Consider a speaker agent and many listeners where listeners perceive differently (e.g., some know what cat furr looks like and others don't). This paper proposes an image reference game and develops a speaker that performs better at the reference game by modeling listener abilities. For example, one person might be able to visually classify many specific dog breeds wheras another person might not know anything about what dogs look like. The speaker utters image attributes which the listener uses to distinguish between the two images. Reference Game Flow: There are two stages of interaction analogous to meta-learning setups: practice and evaluation.

Reviewers all voted to accept this submission and had their concerns generally addressed by the rebuttal. They were impressed by the clarity of the experimental setting and empirical results.

An agent who interacts with a wide population of other agents needs to be aware that there may be variations in their understanding of the world. Furthermore, the machinery which they use to perceive may be inherently different, as is the case between humans and machines. In this work, we present both an image reference game between a speaker and a population of listeners where reasoning about the concepts other agents can comprehend is necessary and a model formulation with this capability. We focus on reasoning about the conceptual understanding of others, as well as adapting to novel gameplay partners and dealing with differences in perceptual machinery. Our experiments on three benchmark image/attribute datasets suggest that our learner indeed encodes information directly pertaining to the understanding of other agents, and that leveraging this information is crucial for maximizing gameplay performance.

An agent who interacts with a wide population of other agents needs to be aware that there may be variations in their understanding of the world. Furthermore, the machinery which they use to perceive may be inherently different, as is the case between humans and machines. In this work, we present both an image reference game between a speaker and a population of listeners where reasoning about the concepts other agents can comprehend is necessary and a model formulation with this capability. We focus on reasoning about the conceptual understanding of others, as well as adapting to novel gameplay partners and dealing with differences in perceptual machinery. Our experiments on three benchmark image/attribute datasets suggest that our learner indeed encodes information directly pertaining to the understanding of other agents, and that leveraging this information is crucial for maximizing gameplay performance. Papers published at the Neural Information Processing Systems Conference.

An agent who interacts with a wide population of other agents needs to be aware that there may be variations in their understanding of the world. Furthermore, the machinery which they use to perceive may be inherently different, as is the case between humans and machines. In this work, we present both an image reference game between a speaker and a population of listeners where reasoning about the concepts other agents can comprehend is necessary and a model formulation with this capability. We focus on reasoning about the conceptual understanding of others, as well as adapting to novel gameplay partners and dealing with differences in perceptual machinery. Our experiments on three benchmark image/attribute datasets suggest that our learner indeed encodes information directly pertaining to the understanding of other agents, and that leveraging this information is crucial for maximizing gameplay performance.