Looking for papers on general formalizations of "agency"

Hi!Recently, I immersed myself in researching the possibility of a general formal definition of "agency".More specifically, I’m interested in formalizations that could support an operational definition of agency across domains. I’m looking for something that captures what is common between entities that intuitively seem agentic to us in very different parts of the world, and that could, at least in principle, let us detect such entities automatically in real systems.So far, many definitions of agency I’ve seen quickly rely on terms like “goal”, “intention”, “belief”, “choice”, “sensor”, “actuator”, and so on. These can be useful in a particular context, but they are less satisfying if I want to take an arbitrary dynamical system and ask: “is there anything agent-like here, and can we detect it without hand-labeling the agent in advance?”So my short request is: if you know good papers that formalize agency, or important aspects of agency, at a fairly general level? I’d be very grateful for pointers.As a starting point, I’ve been thinking within the embedded agency framing. So far, I have found two papers that seem very valuable because they formalize some “component parts” of agency.The first one is “Semantic information, autonomous agency, and nonequilibrium statistical physics” (2018). What I found useful there is the idea that, for many agents, maintaining viability is an implicit instrumental requirement, regardless of the particular utility function we might later ascribe to them. And that we can use this feature to detect systems via their information content, because, to sustain itself, a system should use its internal information about the environment. This paper attempts to formalize the calculation of such information that a system has about the environment, in a statistical sense, and to detect the part of that information that is causally necessary for the system to maintain its existence over time — “semantic information”, in the authors’ terminology.The