  Speakers communicate to influence their partner's beliefs and shape their
actions. Belief- and action-based objectives have been explored independently
in recent computational models, but it has been challenging to explicitly
compare or integrate them. Indeed, we find that they are conflated in standard
referential communication tasks. To distinguish these accounts, we introduce a
new paradigm called signaling bandits, generalizing classic Lewis signaling
games to a multi-armed bandit setting where all targets in the context have
some relative value. We develop three speaker models: a belief-oriented speaker
with a purely informative objective; an action-oriented speaker with an
instrumental objective; and a combined speaker which integrates the two by
inducing listener beliefs that generally lead to desirable actions. We then
present a series of simulations demonstrating that grounding production choices
in future listener actions results in relevance effects and flexible uses of
nonliteral language. More broadly, our findings suggest that language games
based on richer decision problems are a promising avenue for insight into
rational communication.
