David Abel

Thrilled to share our new #NeurIPS2025 paper done at @GoogleDeepMind, Plasticity as the Mirror of Empowerment We prove every agent faces a trade-off between its capacity to adapt (plasticity) and its capacity to steer (empowerment) Paper: david-abel.github.io/plasticity.pdf 🧵🧵🧵👇

Reminder that the deadline for the Finding the Frame workshop @RL_Conference is coming up on May 22 AoE ⏰ We're excited to read your submissions reflecting on the philosophy, practice, and formalisms of reinforcement learning! 🔗 More details: sites.google.com/view/findingth…

@Dr_Atoosa @GoogleDeepMind Congrats Atoosa!

🌟 Big personal news: I’m joining @GoogleDeepMind full-time in London starting this week. I’ll be working on the implications of AGI for human life, science, and society; on what it means to live, connect, and discover in a world where cognitive agency is no longer uniquely ours. The way we answer these questions will define what it means to be human. I can’t think of a better place to do it.

@shimon8282 @whi_rl Congratulations Shimon! Exciting news, welcome to DeepMind 🙂

Major personal news: After 6 years, I am leaving Waymo to lead a new multi-agent learning team at DeepMind.

Finding the Frame will be back at @RL_Conference 2026 with a fantastic speaker lineup! We welcome submissions that reflect on the philosophy, practice, and formalisms of reinforcement learning. 📅Submission deadline: May 22, 2026 (AoE) More details: sites.google.com/view/findingth…

@itsNVA7 Congratulations Nishanth!!

Thrilled to share that on March 20th, I defended my Ph.D. with flying colours! 🎨🎓🧠 My thesis, "The permanent and transient framework for continual RL," had an amazing reception from my committee: Peter Dayan, Marc Bellemare, Paul Masset, and Doina Precup.

Excited to be at (my first) #ICLR2026 this week to present work with Tom Griffiths (@cocosci_lab) on efficient exploration for LLM agents 🧵

Standard RL assumes a stable world. The real world may not. ♾ Introducing the Continual RL Workshop @RL_Conference 2026, Montreal, Canada. 🤖 Agents should never stop learning! 🖼️ Site: sites.google.com/view/continual… 📄 Submit: sites.google.com/view/continual…

Really excited to present our recent work at #ICLR2026 this week! We discover highly coordinated joint behaviours and integrate them into the skill sets of MARL agents, accelerating the search for effective joint strategies in downstream tasks.🧵 Paper: raulsteleac.github.io/iaro

New preprint of a paper with Eunice Yiu to appear in Philosophical Transactions A, Special issue: World models, 2026. The theoretical link between empowerment in RL and Bayesian causal models with cool new data. arxiv.org/abs/2512.08230

We're thrilled to announce Finding the Frame is back for the third time @RL_Conference 2026!🎉 Call for papers coming soon 🚀

We have the keynote speakers for RLC2026 now: Thrilled to welcome @contactrika, @ravi_iitm, @SheilaMcIlraith, @marcgbellemare, and @danijarh! Details: rl-conference.cc/index.html The RL community is coming together this August in Montréal, Québec, Canada. Hope you make it!

The "decoupling of information and energy" is a major point of divergence between biological and artificial computers. Brains are efficient, modern AI isn't. And energy consumption is the biggest bottleneck in scaling AI (you can't hallucinate electrons into existence). To address this we need an "energy-aware theory of computation." And this new preprint is an attempt to address this. [1/11] 🧵

Newton gave force, inertia, and motion precise mathematical definitions. This unlocked centuries of progress in mechanics. Turing did it for "computation," and Shannon for "information." Today, "agency" still feels a bit like "computation" before Turing: everybody uses the word, but there is no widely accepted precise definition. @dabelcs argue that RL needs to take this problem more seriously. [1/3]🧵

PERSIST is a world model that ditches pixel-based histories for a 3D world state. Instead of searching through an ever-growing sequence of past pixel observations, PERSIST retrieves spatial information from a dynamically evolving 3D representation. This change improves the spatial memory, 3D consistency, and long-horizon stability of the model, enabling interactive experiences within coherent and evolving 3D worlds. #MachineLearning #WorldModels #GenerativeAI #3DComputerVision #ComputerVision #Genie3 #AI

Assembling a team at DeepMind in London. Scaling up RL for post-training is working, but right now it's still mostly hacks and dark arts (pretraining circa 2019). Pre-training wasn't always scaling laws and log-log plots; someone had to find the simplicity. We aim to do the same. If you're interested in doing things right in a research-first environment that scales all the way, please apply: job-boards.greenhouse.io/deepmind/jobs/…

Hiring a postdoc for the Normativity Lab at Johns Hopkins (2026 start). Looking for multiagent systems expertise (RL/generative agents) + interdisciplinary background in AI and cognitive science/econ/cultural evolution. apply.interfolio.com/177701

New preprint in advance of a Phil Trans paper. Outlining a theoretical argument bridging Bayesian causal learning and empowerment in reinforcement learning. And empirical data that kids do too! arxiv.org/abs/2512.08230

🚨Exciting new opportunity🚨 Come and work with me and a fantastic team @GoogleDeepMind exploring the political, economic, social and cultural impact of advanced AI technology, including AGI and beyond! The details and application link can be found below!

@ma_tay_ @humansand Congratulations Taylor!!

Also happy to share that I've joined @humansand!! More details in the coming days, but I am SO excited to build AI to work with and be good for humans!

Amazing opportunity to work with @ermgrant