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