By the age of two, children tend to assume that new word categories are based on objects' shape, rather than their color or texture; this assumption is called the shape bias. They are thought to learn this bias by observing that their caregiver's language is biased towards shape based categories. This presents a chicken and egg problem: if the shape bias must be present in the language in order for children to learn it, how did it arise in language in the first place? In this paper, we propose that communicative efficiency explains both how the shape bias emerged and why it persists across generations. We model this process with neural emergent language agents that learn to communicate about raw pixelated images. First, we show that the shape bias emerges as a result of efficient communication strategies employed by agents. Second, we show that pressure brought on by communicative need is also necessary for it to persist across generations; simply having a shape bias in an agent's input language is insufficient. These results suggest that, over and above the operation of other learning strategies, the shape bias in human learners may emerge and be sustained by communicative pressures.

中文翻译：

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沟通效率导致形状偏差的出现

到两岁时，孩子们倾向于认为新词的分类是基于物体的形状，而不是它们的颜色或质地；这种假设称为形状偏差。他们被认为是通过观察他们的看护者的语言偏向于基于形状的类别来学习这种偏见的。这就提出了一个鸡和蛋的问题：如果语言中必须存在形状偏差才能让孩子们学习它，那么它最初是如何在语言中产生的？在本文中，我们提出沟通效率解释了形状偏差是如何出现的，以及为什么它会在几代人之间持续存在。我们使用学习如何就原始像素化图像进行交流的神经涌现语言代理对这个过程进行建模。首先，我们表明形状偏差是代理采用的有效沟通策略的结果。第二，我们表明，交流需要带来的压力也是它在几代人中持续存在的必要条件；仅仅在代理的输入语言中存在形状偏差是不够的。这些结果表明，除了其他学习策略的操作之外，人类学习者的形状偏差可能会出现并由交流压力维持。