Code for Emergent Communication under Competition (AAMAS 2021) experiments with the biased sender-receiver game. For experiments with the negotiation game see the other repo here

To cite in bibtex, please use

@inproceedings{Noukhovitch2021ECCompete,
  title={Emergent Communication under Competition},
  author={Michael Noukhovitch and Travis LaCroix and Angeliki Lazaridou and Aaron Courville},
  booktitle={AAMAS},
  year={2021}
}

Clone this repo and cd into the directory. I recommend installing in a venv (or conda, virtualenv ...)

python -m venv env
source env/bin/activate

I recommend treating the repo as a package and you can then install all dependecies with pip

pip install -e .

If you want to run the extra dependecies for the notebooks, add notebook to the end of the previous command.

To facilitate hyperparameter searches, I use orion. If you want to set up a database you can do so with

orion setup-db

and select pickleddb and a location to save it to as your host e.g. ~/orion.db

Train the models with src/train.py. We use gin-config so all configurations can be easily viewed in configs/. You can override any params of the configs when running by adding them in the --gin_param arg

python src/train.py --gin_file /path/to/your/config --gin_param overriding_param=value

The best hyperparameters for any given experiment are given in the .gin config. See the README.md in configs/ for more info.

Training logs are saved in logs.json in the directory specified by --gin_param train.savedir=$SAVEDIR

orion works nicely with gin-config to do hyperparameter optimization. To define the search space of our parameter we specify a distribution for the parameter and orion's random search will draw a value for the parameter at each hyperparmeter seed.

Our search spaces are under configs/ and have the -search.gin ending. You can run the hyperparameter search taking the mean over 5 seeds with

orion hunt -n some-name \
      --working-dir /path/to/savedir \
      --max-trials number-of-hyperparams-tried \
      src/orion_runs.py \
      --config /path/to/config-search.gin \
      --gin_param overrriding_param=value

If you don't care about using orion's cli to check the best run, you can run the above as orion --debug hunt ... to eliminate the bottleneck of writing to the db.

To reproduce the graphs for the best hyperparameters of any particular experiment, you need to run 5 random seeds (using src/orion_runs.py) with the best hyperparameters found for that setup and then plot the results with the jupyter notebook notebooks/Best Results Plot.ipynb

E.g if you wanted to reproduce the run for the game with discrete messages (cat-deter) and using a bias of 90 degrees (bias9) saving to some $SAVEDIR

src/orion_runs.py  --config ./configs/cat-deter-bias9.gin --savedir $SAVEDIR

This will create folders 0-5 corresponding to each random seed in $SAVEDIR. Then call plot($SAVEDIR) from Best Resuts Plot to reproduce the plot for that run.

To get the best hyperparameters, you can do a hyperparameter search with Orion and save all the results to a folder. E.g. your folder structure is $logdir/cat-deter-bias0/ with all the runs in that dir having different values for ending i.e. cat-deter-bias0/cat-deter-bias0_fd08f7459ad1c768d76caa8e3476a8e6 is one hyperparameter configuration with ID fd08f7459ad1c768d76caa8e3476a8e6

To get the best hyperparameters for every bias, run

python gen_results.py generate --experiment-name cat-deter --results_dir logdir --output-dir ~/emergent-compete/results/cat-deter

This will give you a results.csv with the best value per run and corresponding ID of the run as well as copying over the folders with the best runs. Then you can use ~/emergent-compete/results/cat-deter as the resultspath in Best Results Plot.ipynb

To reproduce the graph plotting the best result per bias, you need to run the five seeds for each bias and then save them in folders with the bias specified as bias$BIAS. E.g if you wanted to reproduce the results for discrete messages (cat-deter), then make your $SAVEDIR a template such as ./cat-deter-results/cat-deter-bias$BIAS

src/orion_runs.py  --config ./configs/cat-deter-bias0.gin --savedir ./cat-deter-results/cat-deter-bias0
src/orion_runs.py  --config ./configs/cat-deter-bias3.gin --savedir ./cat-deter-results/cat-deter-bias3

Next, in Best Results Plot.ipynb you can run plot_hyperparam_results("./cat-deter-results/") which will plot the best hyperparameters for each run as well as the graph of best result per bias

This plots the sender vs receiver error for all hyperparameter searches so first you need to run 100 hyperparameter searches for the given hyperparameter search space. E.g. if you wanted to get all 100 hyperparameter runs (--max-trials 100) for discrete messages (configs/cat-deter-search.gin) with bias 90 degrees (Game.bias=9) and the directory you're saving all runs in is results/

orion --debug hunt -n cat-deter-bias9 \
      --working-dir results/ \
      --max-trials 100 \
      src/orion_runs.py \
      --config configs/cat-deter-search.gin \
      --gin_param Game.bias=9

For an example slurm script see scripts/hyperparam_search.sh

To recreate the continuous messages vs discrete messages plots you need to run this for all biases 0,3,6,9,12,15 and for both configs cat-deter-search.gin and gauss-deter-search.gin. If you save your results in folders with template names (e.g. cat-deter-bias$BIAS) then you can use the notebook Hyperparam Search Plots.ipynb to create the Figure 4 plot. For individual plots, you can call all_metrics("../results/") and make a scatterplot with the resulting values