Goal-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning Reading List

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

Key papers on goal-conditioned reinforcement learning — universal value functions, contrastive methods, and techniques for training policies that generalize across goals.

Goal-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning: 10 key papers

1. Universal Value Function Approximators
   Schaul et al. International Conference on Machine Learning 2015.
2. Contrastive Learning as Goal-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning
   Eysenbach et al. arXiv 2022.
3. Learning to Reach Goals via Iterated Supervised Learning
   Ghosh et al. arXiv 2019.
4. Goal-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning: Problems and Solutions
   Liu et al. arXiv 2022.
5. C-Learning: Learning to Achieve Goals via Recursive Classification
   Eysenbach et al. arXiv 2020.
6. Planning to Practice: Efficient Online Fine-Tuning by Composing Goals in Latent Space
   Fang et al. arXiv 2022.
7. Search on the Replay Buffer: Bridging Planning and Reinforcement Learning
   Eysenbach et al. arXiv 2019.
8. Skew-Fit: State-Covering Self-Supervised Reinforcement Learning
   Pong et al. arXiv 2019.
9. Visual Reinforcement Learning with Imagined Goals
   Nair et al. arXiv 2018.
10. Goal-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning with Imagined Subgoals
    Chane-Sane et al. arXiv 2021.

Related reading lists

• Zero-Shot RL & Generalization
• Classical Planning & Search Algorithms
• Contrastive & Self-Supervised Learning
• Block MDPs & Latent State Discovery
• Offline-to-Online RL & Fine-Tuning
• Intrinsic Motivation & Empowerment
• Representation Learning for RL
• World Models and Model-Based RL