Curiosity-Driven Exploration Reading List

Curated by Mouhssine Rifaki | Stanford Electrical Engineering | Last updated August 2026

Foundational papers on curiosity as an intrinsic drive for exploration — from prediction-error bonuses and forward-model curiosity to Random Network Distillation and beyond.

Curiosity-Driven Exploration: 10 key papers

1. Curiosity-driven Exploration by Self-supervised Prediction
   Pathak et al. arXiv 2017.
2. Large-Scale Study of Curiosity-Driven Learning
   Burda et al. arXiv 2018.
3. Count-Based Exploration with Neural Density Models
   Ostrovski et al. arXiv 2017.
4. Episodic Curiosity through Reachability
   Savinov et al. arXiv 2018.
5. Planning to Explore via Self-Supervised World Models
   Sekar et al. arXiv 2020.
6. Self-Supervised Exploration via Disagreement
   Pathak et al. arXiv 2019.
7. Agent57: Outperforming the Atari Human Benchmark
   Badia et al. arXiv 2020.
8. BYOL-Explore: Exploration by Bootstrapped Prediction
   Guo et al. arXiv 2022.
9. RIDE: Rewarding Impact-Driven Exploration for Procedurally-Generated Environments
   Raileanu and Rocktäschel. arXiv 2020.
10. Novelty Search in Representational Space for Sample Efficient Exploration
    Tao et al. arXiv 2020.

Related reading lists

• Exploration in Reinforcement Learning
• World Models and Model-Based RL
• Information Theory & RL
• Classical Planning & Search Algorithms
• Quality-Diversity & Novelty Search
• Bayesian RL & Thompson Sampling
• Autonomous Driving with RL
• In-Context RL & Prompting