Efficiency & Convexity

Notes

This repository accompanies the paper "When Efficient Communication Explains Convexity." For code and data related to that paper, please navigate to src/examples/colors.

Installing Efficiency & Convexity

1. Download or clone this repository and navigate to the root folder.

2. Install the IB Optimizer (We recommend doing this inside a virtual environment)

   pip install -e .

Development, Examples, & Tests

Setting Up the Environment

First, install uv. After uv is installed navigate to root of the project and execute:

uv sync

Testing

Tests are located in src/tests and can be run using:

uv run pytest

Examples

Examples can be found in the src/examples folder. Each example will have documentation of how to execute its scripts in their respective README.md files. Note that oftentimes scripts from each example are to be executed in the src/examples folder, NOT the folder of the example itself.

References

Links:

Tishby, N., Fernando P., & Bialek, W. (2000). The information bottleneck method. The 37th annual Allerton Conference on Communication, Control, and Computing. pp. 368–377. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.physics/0004057

Skinner, L. (2025). Convexity is a Fundamental Feature of Efficient Semantic Compression in Probability Spaces. https://hdl.handle.net/1773/53008

Zaslavsky, N., Kemp, C., Regier, T., & Tishby, N. (2018). Efficient compression in color naming and its evolution. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 115(31), 7937–7942. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1800521115