David Abel on the Science of Agency @ RLDM 2025

TalkRL: The Reinforcement Learning Podcast

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