David Abel

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David Abel

David Abel

@dabelcs

Scientist @GoogleDeepMind and Fellow @EdinburghUni | RL, philosophy, agency, foundations | office hours: https://t.co/XrrHAXXHi5

Edinburgh, Scotland شامل ہوئے Ocak 2018
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David Abel
David Abel@dabelcs·
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 🧵🧵🧵👇
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Hadi Vafaii
Hadi Vafaii@hadivafaii·
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] 🧵
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Hadi Vafaii
Hadi Vafaii@hadivafaii·
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]🧵
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Samuel Garcin
Samuel Garcin@SamuelGarcin·
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
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Ian Osband
Ian Osband@IanOsband·
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/…
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Gillian Hadfield
Gillian Hadfield@ghadfield·
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
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Alison Gopnik
Alison Gopnik@AlisonGopnik·
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
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Iason Gabriel
Iason Gabriel@IasonGabriel·
🚨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!
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Taylor Sorensen
Taylor Sorensen@ma_tay_·
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!
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Erin Grant
Erin Grant@ermgrant·
Thrilled to announce I'll start in 2026 as faculty in Psych & CS @UAlberta + @AmiiThinks Fellow!! 🥳 Recruiting students to develop theories of cognition in natural and artificial systems 🤖💭🧠. Find me at #NeurIPS2025 workshops (talk at @CogInterp & organising @DataOnBrainMind)
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David Abel
David Abel@dabelcs·
Interested in the theory of agents / definitions / RL under minimal assumptions? I'll be at poster #512 today (Thurs.) in the 4.30pm-7.30pm session. Come on by 🙂
David Abel@dabelcs

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 🧵🧵🧵👇

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Alex Lewandowski
Alex Lewandowski@axlewandowski·
At NeurIPS and interested in continual learning? Stop by our spotlight poster this Friday @ 11am (#508). Our work provides a computational approach to the big world hypothesis through embedded agents. Feel free to reach out if you want to meet up while in San Diego!
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Trevor McInroe
Trevor McInroe@trevormcinroe·
Introducing Terra Nova, a new comprehensive challenge environment for RL research inspired by Civilization V.
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Daniel Furelos-Blanco
Daniel Furelos-Blanco@_danielfb·
It was a pleasure to have @dabelcs present this work last October at @SPIKE_ICL! 📽️ The recording of the talk is now available: youtube.com/watch?v=XWxP_q… Don't miss their poster at #NeurIPS2025 🚀
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David Abel@dabelcs

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 🧵🧵🧵👇

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edo
edo@edov_i·
@giffmana MDP is the worst thing about RL, beating the 'starting-from-scratch' every time. That's why I liked this paper arxiv.org/abs/2407.10583
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Kale-ab Tessera
Kale-ab Tessera@KaliTessera·
Thrilled to present HyperMARL at #NeurIPS2025 in San Diego next week! 🚀 (Amos will present at @EurIPSConf too.) TL;DR: Coupling obs and agent IDs can hurt perf in MARL. Agent-conditioned hypernets cleanly decouple grads and enable specialisation. 📜: arxiv.org/abs/2412.04233
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Kale-ab Tessera@KaliTessera

📜🤖 Can a shared multi-agent RL policy support both specialised & homogeneous team behaviours -- without changing the learning objective, requiring preset diversity levels or sequential updates? Our preprint “HyperMARL: Adaptive Hypernetworks for Multi-Agent RL” explores this!

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