April 30, 2018
While most machine translation systems to date are trained on large parallel corpora, humans learn language in a different way: by being grounded in an environment and interacting with other humans. In this work, we propose a communication game where two agents, native speakers of their own respective languages, jointly learn to solve a visual referential task. We find that the ability to understand and translate a foreign language emerges as a means to achieve shared goals. The emergent translation is interactive and multimodal, and crucially does not require parallel corpora, but only monolingual, independent text and corresponding images. Our proposed translation model achieves this by grounding the source and target languages into a shared visual modality, and outperforms several baselines on both word-level and sentence-level translation tasks. Furthermore, we show that agents in a multilingual community learn to translate better and faster than in a bilingual communication setting.
February 11, 2026
Leon Liangyu Chen, Haoyu Ma, Zhipeng Fan, Ziqi Huang, Animesh Sinha, Xiaoliang Dai, Jialiang Wang, Zecheng He, Jianwei Yang, Chunyuan Li, Junzhe Sun, Chu Wang, Serena Yeung-Levy, Felix Juefei-Xu
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Yuandong Tian, Jerry Ma, Qucheng Gong, Shubho Sengupta, Zhuoyuan Chen, James Pinkerton, Larry Zitnick
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April 30, 2018
Zhilin Yang, Saizheng Zhang, Jack Urbanek, Will Feng, Alexander H. Miller, Arthur Szlam, Douwe Kiela, Jason Weston
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October 10, 2016
Matthijs Douze, Hervé Jégou, Florent Perronnin
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June 18, 2018
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