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

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David Abel on the Science of Agency @ RLDM 2025 is an episode from TalkRL: The Reinforcement Learning Podcast by Robin Ranjit Singh Chauhan.

This episode is 59:42 long.

This episode was published on Sep 8, 2025.

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