Scientist @GoogleDeepMind and Fellow @EdinburghUni | RL, philosophy, agency, foundations, alignment | office hours: tinyurl.com/dabel-mtg
Joined January 2018
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Pinned Tweet
4 Nov 2025
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/plastic…
🧵🧵🧵👇
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David Abel retweeted
Jun 10
We are starting a new, nonprofit alignment organization, ⊢ Sequent Research, bringing together researchers previously on UK AISI’s Alignment Team, Timaeus, and elsewhere to research how to align superintelligence. We are hiring! 🧵
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David Abel retweeted
Just published in @PNASNews, we resolve a 50-year-old riddle from Richard Feynman's handwritten notes, prove and generalize it, and run a large-scale human study to reveal near-optimal heuristics in sequential decision problems:
doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2509612…
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David Abel retweeted
May 25
"Imperfect World Models are Exploitable"
World models can look accurate, but still rank policies incorrectly, saying policy A is better than policy B when the real environment says the reverse.
This paper formalizes that failure as model exploitation and proves it is basically unavoidable for any nontrivial, nonequivalent world model on broad policy sets.
It also connects this to reward hacking and derives a safe horizon showing how model error compounds with planning depth.
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David Abel retweeted
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/findin…
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David Abel retweeted
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/findin…
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David Abel retweeted
Excited to be at (my first) #ICLR2026 this week to present work with Tom Griffiths (@cocosci_lab) on efficient exploration for LLM agents 🧵
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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/contin…
📄 Submit: sites.google.com/view/contin…
ALT Tentative lineup
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David Abel retweeted
Apr 20
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
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David Abel retweeted
Apr 16
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
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David Abel retweeted
We're thrilled to announce Finding the Frame is back for the third time @RL_Conference 2026!🎉 Call for papers coming soon 🚀
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David Abel retweeted
Mar 31
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!
24 Dec 2025
Hi RL Enthusiasts!
RLC is coming to Montreal, Quebec: Aug 16–19, 2026.
CFP is out now: rl-conference.cc/callforpape…
Abstract: Mar 1
Submission: Mar 5 AOE
Submit your best work and please share widely!
#RLC #MachineLearning #AI #LLMs #RLHF #ReinforcementLearning #Research
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David Abel retweeted
Mar 16
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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David Abel retweeted
Mar 6
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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David Abel retweeted
Mar 5
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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David Abel retweeted
Mar 5
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/dee…
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David Abel retweeted
16 Dec 2025
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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David Abel retweeted
10 Dec 2025
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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David Abel retweeted
1 Dec 2025
🚨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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6 Dec 2025
Amazing opportunity to work with @ermgrant
6 Dec 2025
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 retweeted
6 Dec 2025
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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