Imitation Learning and Inverse RL Reading List

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

Learning from demonstrations instead of rewards. From behavioral cloning to modern adversarial imitation.

Imitation Learning and Inverse RL: 10 key papers

1. A Reduction of Imitation Learning and Structured Prediction to No-Regret Online Learning
   Ross et al. arXiv 2010.
2. Generative Adversarial Imitation Learning
   Ho and Ermon. arXiv 2016.
3. Modeling Strong and Human-Like Gameplay with KL-Regularized Search
   Jacob et al. arXiv 2021.
4. An Algorithmic Perspective on Imitation Learning
   Osa et al. arXiv 2018.
5. Provable Representation Learning for Imitation Learning via Bi-level Optimization
   Arora et al. arXiv 2020.
6. Primal Wasserstein Imitation Learning
   Dadashi et al. arXiv 2020.
7. What Matters for Adversarial Imitation Learning?
   Orsini et al. arXiv 2021.
8. Imitation Learning: Progress, Taxonomies and Challenges
   Zheng et al. arXiv 2021.
9. SQIL: Imitation Learning via Reinforcement Learning with Sparse Rewards
   Reddy et al. arXiv 2019.
10. Imitation Learning via Off-Policy Distribution Matching
    Kostrikov et al. arXiv 2019.

Related reading lists

• Offline Imitation Learning
• Inverse Reinforcement Learning
• Behavioral Cloning & Offline Imitation
• Reward Learning & Reward Modeling
• Robust & Risk-Sensitive RL
• Causal Inference & RL
• Generative Modeling
• Adversarial Reinforcement Learning & Robustness to Adversaries