Emergent Communication Under Misinformation

Social interactions are characterized by both adversarial and cooperative aspects. Communications between agents may also involve adversarially motivated actors. Messages may pass through intermediaries of malign intents 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 studies of the emergent communication field, which aims 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 pressure towards compositionality and that partial misinformation where the intermediary targets only a subset of attributes can also induce compositionality.