Curriculum Learning & Teacher-Student Reading List

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

Not all training tasks are equally useful at each stage of learning. These papers formalize curricula through teacher-student games, regret-based generation, and evolutionary approaches that shape exploration and accelerate acquisition.

Curriculum Learning & Teacher-Student: 10 key papers

1. Curriculum Learning for Reinforcement Learning Domains: A Framework and Survey
   Narvekar et al. arXiv 2020.
2. Automatic Goal Generation for Reinforcement Learning Agents
   Florensa et al. arXiv 2017.
3. Teacher-Student Curriculum Learning
   Matiisen et al. arXiv 2017.
4. Reverse Curriculum Generation for Reinforcement Learning
   Florensa et al. arXiv 2017.
5. Automatic Curriculum Learning For Deep RL: A Short Survey
   Portelas et al. arXiv 2020.
6. Intrinsic Motivation and Automatic Curricula via Asymmetric Self-Play
   Sukhbaatar et al. arXiv 2017.
7. Automated Curriculum Learning for Neural Networks
   Graves et al. arXiv 2017.
8. Self-Paced Contextual Reinforcement Learning
   Klink et al. arXiv 2019.
9. Self-Paced Deep Reinforcement Learning
   Klink et al. arXiv 2020.
10. Curriculum Learning: A Survey
    Soviany et al. arXiv 2021.

Related reading lists

• Self-Play & Population-Based Training
• Intrinsic Motivation & Empowerment
• Formal Verification & Neural Theorem Proving
• Unsupervised Environment Design
• Retrieval-Augmented Generation
• Offline Imitation Learning
• Exploration in Reinforcement Learning
• Population-Based Training