Semantic Rate-Distortion for Bounded Multi-Agent Communication: Capacity-Derived Semantic Spaces and the Communication Cost of Alignment

ArXi:2604.09521v1 Announce Type: cross 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.