Semantic Rate-Distortion for Bounded Multi-Agent Communication: Capacity-Derived Semantic Spaces and the Communication Cost of Alignment
When two agents of different computational capacities interact with the same environment, they need not compress a common semantic alphabet differently; they can induce different semantic alphabets altogether. We show that the quotient POMDP $Q_{m,T}(M)$ - the unique coarsest abstraction consistent with an agent's capacity - serves as a capacity-derived semantic space for any bounded agent, and that communication between heterogeneous agents exhibits a sharp structural phase transition. Below a critical rate $R_{\text{crit}}$ determined by the quotient mismatch, intent-preserving communication is structurally impossible. In the supported one-way memoryless regime, classical side-informati...
| Authors | Anthony T. Nixon |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.IT |
| Published | 10 April 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 10 April 2026 |
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