Emergent communication studies the development of language between autonomous agents, aiming to improve understanding of natural language evolution and increase communication efficiency. While temporal aspects of language have been considered in computational linguistics, there has been no research on temporal references in emergent communication. This paper addresses this gap, by exploring how agents communicate about temporal relationships. We analyse three potential influences for the emergence of temporal references: environmental, external, and architectural changes. Our experiments demonstrate that altering the loss function is insufficient for temporal references to emerge; rather, architectural changes are necessary. However, a minimal change in agent architecture, using a different batching method, allows the emergence of temporal references. This modified design is compared with the standard architecture in a temporal referential games environment, which emphasises temporal relationships. The analysis indicates that over 95\% of the agents with the modified batching method develop temporal references, without changes to their loss function. We consider temporal referencing necessary for future improvements to the agents' communication efficiency, yielding a closer to optimal coding as compared to purely compositional languages. Our readily transferable architectural insights provide the basis for their incorporation into other emergent communication settings.

翻译：涌现通信研究自主智能体之间的语言发展过程，旨在提升对自然语言演化的理解并提高通信效率。尽管计算语言学已关注语言的时间维度，但涌现通信领域尚未涉及时间指代的研究。本文通过探究智能体如何交流时间关系来填补这一空白，分析了促使时间指代涌现的三类潜在因素：环境变化、外部因素及架构调整。实验表明，仅修改损失函数不足以引发时间指代；架构调整才是必要条件。然而，仅需对智能体架构进行微小改动——采用不同的批次处理方法，即可促成时间指代的涌现。我们在强调时间关系的指代游戏环境中，将这种改进架构与标准架构进行对比。分析显示，超过95%采用改进批次处理方法的智能体发展出了时间指代能力，且无需修改其损失函数。我们认为时间指代能力是未来提升智能体通信效率的关键，相较于纯组合语言，它能实现更接近最优的编码方式。本文提出的易于迁移的架构优化方案，为其他涌现通信场景的应用奠定了基础。