Can be addressed by regularizing the reporter’s output: penalizing response length or entropy and a GAN-type penalty for non-human-like questions and answers.
Can you say more about how this would work? I haven’t been following the literature on emergent communication too closely, but my rough impression had been that steganography in cases like this doesn’t have simple/trivial solutions.
By varying the phrasing and syntax of an answer without changing its meaning, a reporter could communicate large amounts of information to the auxiliary model. Similarly, there are many questions where a human is unsure about the answer and the reporter knows it. A reporter could encode information by answering each of these questions arbitrarily. Unless the true answers have maximum entropy, this strategy could encode more information than direct translation.
An entropy penalty on the reporter’s output would discourage the spurious variations in answers described above (assuming that steganographic output has higher entropy than the true answers). I agree that the general case of steganography is not addressed by simple approaches like an entropy penalty, e.g. “Harder counterexample: steganography using flexible degrees of freedom”.
Can you say more about how this would work? I haven’t been following the literature on emergent communication too closely, but my rough impression had been that steganography in cases like this doesn’t have simple/trivial solutions.
I think our proposal addresses the “simple steganography” problem, as described in “ELK prize results / First counterexample: simple steganography”:
An entropy penalty on the reporter’s output would discourage the spurious variations in answers described above (assuming that steganographic output has higher entropy than the true answers). I agree that the general case of steganography is not addressed by simple approaches like an entropy penalty, e.g. “Harder counterexample: steganography using flexible degrees of freedom”.