Several approaches have recently been proposed for learning decentralized deep multiagent policies that coordinate via a differentiable communication channel. While these policies are effective for many tasks, interpretation of their induced communication strategies has remained a challenge. Here we propose to interpret agents' messages by translating them. Unlike in typical machine translation problems, we have no parallel data to learn from. Instead we develop a translation model based on the insight that agent messages and natural language strings mean the same thing if they induce the same belief about the world in a listener. We present theoretical guarantees and empirical evidence that our approach preserves both the semantics and pragmatics of messages by ensuring that players communicating through a translation layer do not suffer a substantial loss in reward relative to players with a common language.
Our evaluation in this paper investigates communication strategies that arise in a number of different games, including reference games and an extended-horizon driving game. Communication strategies for reference games were previously explored by , and , and reference games specifically featuring end-to-end communication protocols by . On the control side, a long line of work considers nonverbal communication strategies in multiagent policies @cite_2 .
@cite_2
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Legible motion — motion that communicates its intent to a human observer — is crucial for enabling seamless human-robot collaboration. In this paper, we propose a functional gradient optimization technique for autonomously generating legible motion. Our algorithm optimizes a legibility metric inspired by the psychology of action interpretation in humans, resulting in motion trajectories that purposefully deviate from what an observer would expect in order to better convey intent. A trust region constraint on the optimization ensures that the motion does not become too surprising or unpredictable to the observer. Our studies with novice users that evaluate the resulting trajectories support the applicability of our method and of such a trust region. They show that within the region, legibility as measured in practice does significantly increase. Outside of it, however, the trajectory becomes confusing and the users’ confidence in knowing the robot’s intent significantly decreases.