Emergent Communication Under Misinformation

Social interactions are characterized by both adversarial and cooperative aspects. Communications between agents may also involve adversarially motivated actors. Messages can pass through intermediaries with malicious intent before reaching the intended receiver. These actors may modify the message to induce misunderstanding from the receiver while preserving the overall characteristics of the message. This form of misinformation is prevalent in real-world communications and may affect the dynamics under which communication protocols are developed. However, this aspect of social interaction is relatively underexplored in many emergent communication studies that aim to understand the environmental factors behind the emergence of languages' characteristics. This work explores how misinformation affects language emergence with a focus on compositionality. We design a communication game containing a malign intermediary between the sender and receiver. We find that risks of malign misrepresentation promote the emergence of compositional languages in simulations of communicative agents. Furthermore, we observe that adaptability of malign intermediaries is a crucial factor in forming a consistent pressure toward compositionality and that partial misinformation, in which the intermediary targets only a subset of attributes, can also induce compositionality.