Portrait of Jeremy Lucas is unavailable

Jeremy Lucas

jeremy.lucas@mila.quebec
Collaborating Alumni - McGill University
Supervisor
Doina Precup
Research Topics
Reinforcement Learning

Publications

A Bellman Optimality Equation for Plasticity
Jeremy Lucas
Doina Precup
In continual reinforcement learning, carefully managing the stability-plasticity tradeoff remains a core challenge. Recent work by Abel et a… (see more)l. (2025) formalized this dilemma by defining plasticity as the generalized directed information from an agent’s observations to its actions, and empowerment as the generalized directed information from its actions to its observations. This formulation successfully reframes the traditional stability-plasticity tradeoff as an empowerment-plasticity tradeoff. However, while extensive literature exists on optimizing for empowerment, there is currently no research addressing the optimization of plasticity under this new definition. This paper presents preliminary work toward optimizing plasticity within Markov decision processes. We show that there exists a Bellman optimality equation for optimizing plasticity similar to previous work for empowerment.
2026-06-15
ContinualRL @ Reinforcement Learning Conference (published)
openreview.net
openreview.net