Intrinsic Motivation & Empowerment Reading List

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

Landmark papers on intrinsic motivation and empowerment — information-theoretic and skill-discovery methods that let agents generate their own learning signals in the absence of extrinsic reward.

Intrinsic Motivation & Empowerment: 10 key papers

1. Variational Intrinsic Control
   Gregor et al. arXiv 2016.
2. VIME: Variational Information Maximizing Exploration
   Houthooft et al. arXiv 2016.
3. Empowerment: A Universal Agent-Centric Measure of Control
   Klyubin et al. IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation 2005.
4. Behavior From the Void: Unsupervised Active Pre-Training
   Liu and Abbeel. arXiv 2021.
5. Reinforcement Learning with Prototypical Representations
   Yarats et al. arXiv 2021.
6. Autotelic Agents with Intrinsically Motivated Goal-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning: a Short Survey
   Colas et al. arXiv 2020.
7. Explore, Discover and Learn: Unsupervised Discovery of State-Covering Skills
   Campos et al. arXiv 2020.
8. Unsupervised Skill Discovery with Bottleneck Option Learning
   Kim et al. arXiv 2021.
9. Lipschitz-constrained Unsupervised Skill Discovery
   Park et al. arXiv 2022.
10. METRA: Scalable Unsupervised RL with Metric-Aware Abstraction
    Park et al. arXiv 2023.

Related reading lists

• Information Theory & RL
• Exploration in Reinforcement Learning
• Hierarchical RL & Options Framework
• Curriculum Learning & Teacher-Student
• Goal-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning
• Emergent Behavior & Self-Organization
• Representation Learning for RL
• Unsupervised Environment Design