Drawing with Strangers: Population Scaling Drives Zero-Shot Mutual Intelligibility in Emergent Sketching

The paper introduces the concept of zero-shot mutual intelligibility (ZMI) in emergent communication, demonstrating that increasing the training population size significantly enhances ZMI among independently trained groups using emergent sketching. The study reveals that larger populations lead to greater in-group communicative variation while reducing cross-group variation, indicating a trend towards universal communication methods grounded in visual perception. This work is significant for practitioners as it highlights the potential for developing socially interoperable AI agents capable of effective communication across diverse populations without prior training.