Explicit communication among humans is key to coordinating and learning. Social learning, which uses cues from experts, can greatly benefit from the usage of explicit communication to align heterogeneous policies, reduce sample complexity, and solve partially observable tasks. Emergent communication, a type of explicit communication, studies the creation of an artificial language to encode a high task-utility message directly from data. However, in most cases, emergent communication sends insufficiently compressed messages with little or null information, which also may not be understandable to a third-party listener. This paper proposes an unsupervised method based on the information bottleneck to capture both referential complexity and task-specific utility to adequately explore sparse social communication scenarios in multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL). We show that our model is able to i) develop a natural-language-inspired lexicon of messages that is independently composed of a set of emergent concepts, which span the observations and intents with minimal bits, ii) develop communication to align the action policies of heterogeneous agents with dissimilar feature models, and iii) learn a communication policy from watching an expert's action policy, which we term `social shadowing'.

本文提出了一种基于信息瓶颈的无监督方法，用于探索非常稀疏的多智能体增强学习中的社交通信情境，该方法可以捕捉引用复杂性和任务特定效用，并开发出一种自然语言灵感的信息组成的词汇表，该词汇表独立于一组紧急概念，使其具有极小的位数，同时可以使用社交影子的观测构成，并通过社交影子来学习通信策略。

关于新兴沟通在多智能体强化学习中的社会学习作用