'Hindsight Gating' Cuts Communication in Bandwidth-Constrained Cooperative Agents

arXiv·medium signal

Most cooperative Vision-Language Navigation assumes unlimited inter-agent communication, ignoring real deployments where bandwidth is scarce. The authors introduce bandwidth-constrained cooperative VLN and 'hindsight gating' — a lightweight supervised gate that labels communication-critical steps post-hoc from navigation failures, avoiding the high variance of REINFORCE. Counterintuitively they find agents should not communicate early; the technique generalizes to any multi-agent system that must ration its message budget.