David Abel on the Science of Agency @ RLDM 2025

David Abel is a Senior Research Scientist at DeepMind on the Agency team, and an Honorary Fellow at the University of Edinburgh. His research blends computer science and philosophy, exploring foundational questions about reinforcement learning, definitions, and the nature of agency.  Featured References  Plasticity as the Mirror of Empowerment   David Abel, Michael Bowling, André Barreto, Will Dabney, Shi Dong, Steven Hansen, Anna Harutyunyan, Khimya Khetarpal, Clare Lyle, Razvan Pascanu, Georgios Piliouras, Doina Precup, Jonathan Richens, Mark Rowland, Tom Schaul, Satinder Singh  A Definition of Continual RL   David Abel, André Barreto, Benjamin Van Roy, Doina Precup, Hado van Hasselt, Satinder Singh  Agency is Frame-Dependent   David Abel, André Barreto, Michael Bowling, Will Dabney, Shi Dong, Steven Hansen, Anna Harutyunyan, Khimya Khetarpal, Clare Lyle, Razvan Pascanu, Georgios Piliouras, Doina Precup, Jonathan Richens, Mark Rowland, Tom Schaul, Satinder Singh  On the Expressivity of Markov Reward   David Abel, Will Dabney, Anna Harutyunyan, Mark Ho, Michael Littman, Doina Precup, Satinder Singh — Outstanding Paper Award, NeurIPS 2021  Additional References  Bidirectional Communication Theory — Marko 1973  Causality, Feedback and Directed Information — Massey 1990  The Big World Hypothesis — Javed et al. 2024  Loss of plasticity in deep continual learning — Dohare et al. 2024  Three Dogmas of Reinforcement Learning — Abel 2024  Explaining dopamine through prediction errors and beyond — Gershman et al. 2024  David Abel Google Scholar  David Abel personal website