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Drawing with Strangers: Population Scaling Drives Zero-Shot Mutual Intelligibility in Emergent Sketching

Generalization in emergent communication has largely focused on novel inputs or linguistic structures, yet the capacity for agents to communicate with strangers from strictly disjoint communities remains relatively unexplored. In this work, we formalize this capability as \textit{zero-shot mutual intelligibility (ZMI)}: successful communication between independently trained populations without prior exposure. Leveraging emergent sketching -- in which agents communicate through sets of drawn strokes -- as a visually grounded modality, we find that scaling the training population substantially improves ZMI across independent groups. Crucially, as we scale the population size, in-group communicative variation increases, preventing co-adaptation into homogeneity. Simultaneously, cross-group variation decreases, indicating a structural convergence toward a certain type of universality. Further analysis reveals that this universality is achieved through perceptual grounding: scaled populations increasingly anchor their emergent sketches on the objective visual resemblance of the target images. Together, these results position ZMI as a distinct axis of generalization in emergent communication and suggest a route toward socially interoperable artificial agents.

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