Emergent communication enables agents to develop bespoke languages that improve communication efficiency. Despite the known importance of temporal structure in natural language, there is no existing evidence of temporal references in emergent communication. This paper addresses this gap, by exploring how agents communicate about temporal relationships. We analyse three potential factors for the emergence of temporal references: environmental, external, and architectural. Our experiments demonstrate that altering the loss function is insufficient for temporal references to emerge; rather, architectural changes are necessary. 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 shows 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, enabling future agents to use a closer to optimal coding as compared to purely compositional languages. These insights provide the basis for incorporation of temporal references into other emergent communication settings, and investigation of other aspects of language.

翻译：涌现通信使智能体能够发展出提升通信效率的定制语言。尽管自然语言中时间结构的重要性已获公认，但现有研究中尚未发现涌现通信中存在时间指代的证据。本文通过探究智能体如何对时间关系进行通信来填补这一空白。我们分析了时间指代涌现的三个潜在因素：环境因素、外部因素和架构因素。实验表明，仅修改损失函数不足以实现时间指代涌现，架构层面的改变不可或缺。采用不同批处理方法对智能体架构进行最小化修改，即可促成时间指代的涌现。在强调时间关系的时序指称游戏环境中，此改进设计与标准架构进行了对比分析。结果显示，超过95%采用改进批处理方法的智能体，在无需修改损失函数的情况下发展出了时间指代能力。我们认为时间指代是未来提升智能体通信效率的必要条件，相较于纯组合语言，它能使未来智能体采用更接近最优编码的通信方式。这些见解为将时间指代纳入其他涌现通信场景，以及探究语言其他维度特征奠定了基础。