Agent-based imitation dynamics can yield efficiently compressed population-level vocabularies

2026-03-16

AI Summary

通过结合进化博弈论与信息瓶颈框架，利用不精确策略模仿动态，解决语言词汇如何演化出高效压缩语义的问题。

Technology Category

• Machine Learning: Evolutionary Learning
• Search and Optimization: Evolutionary Computation
• Natural Language Processing: Code Generation / Program Synthesis from Natural Language

Application Category

• Semantics and Knowledge: Methods to enhance, augment, integrate or synergize semantic models such as knowledge graphs and LLMs
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Models for Web evolution
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: User modeling and simulation for interactive and conversational systems

Abstract

Natural languages have been argued to evolve under pressure to efficiently compress meanings into words by optimizing the Information Bottleneck (IB) complexity-accuracy tradeoff. However, the underlying social dynamics that could drive the optimization of a language's vocabulary towards efficiency remain largely unknown. In parallel, evolutionary game theory has been invoked to explain the emergence of language from rudimentary agent-level dynamics, but it has not yet been tested whether such an approach can lead to efficient compression in the IB sense. Here, we provide a unified model integrating evolutionary game theory with the IB framework and show how near-optimal compression can arise in a population through an independently motivated dynamic of imprecise strategy imitation in signaling games. We find that key parameters of the model -- namely, those that regulate precision in these games, as well as players' tendency to confuse similar states -- lead to constrained variation of the tradeoffs achieved by emergent vocabularies. Our results suggest that evolutionary game dynamics could potentially provide a mechanistic basis for the evolution of vocabularies with information-theoretically optimal and empirically attested properties.

Problem

• information bottleneck
• language evolution
• efficient compression
• evolutionary game theory
• vocabulary emergence

Innovation

• information bottleneck
• evolutionary game theory
• agent-based imitation
• efficient compression
• signaling games