Calibrate your listeners! Robust communication-based training for pragmatic speakers
To be good conversational partners, natural language processing (NLP) systems should be trained to produce contextually useful utterances. Prior work has investigated training NLP systems with communication-based objectives, where a neural listener stands in as a communication partner. However, these systems commonly suffer from semantic drift where the learned language diverges radically from natural language. We propose a method that uses a population of neural listeners to regularize speaker training. We first show that language drift originates from the poor uncertainty calibration of a neural listener, which makes high-certainty predictions on novel sentences. We explore ensemble- and dropout-based populations of listeners and find that the former results in better uncertainty quantification. We evaluate both population-based objectives on reference games, and show that the ensemble method with better calibration enables the speaker to generate pragmatic utterances while scaling to a large vocabulary and generalizing to new games and listeners.
Code (1)
Tasks
Uncertainty QuantificationSimilar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
How Hypocritical Is Your LLM judge? Listener-Speaker Asymmetries in the Pragmatic Competence of Large Language Models
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly studied as repositories of linguistic knowledge. In this line of work, models are commonly evaluated both as generators of language and as judges of linguistic output, yet th…
Communicating with Speakers and Listeners of Different Pragmatic Levels
This paper explores the impact of variable pragmatic competence on communicative success through simulating language learning and conversing between speakers and listeners with different levels of reasoning abilities. Th…
Scalable pragmatic communication via self-supervision
Models of context-sensitive communication often use the Rational Speech Act framework (RSA; Frank & Goodman, 2012), which formulates listeners and speakers in a cooperative reasoning process. However, the standard RSA fo…
Learning to Mediate Disparities Towards Pragmatic Communication
Human communication is a collaborative process. Speakers, on top of conveying their own intent, adjust the content and language expressions by taking the listeners into account, including their knowledge background, pers…
Learning to refer informatively by amortizing pragmatic reasoning
A hallmark of human language is the ability to effectively and efficiently convey contextually relevant information. One theory for how humans reason about language is presented in the Rational Speech Acts (RSA) framewor…