Swarm RL & Collective Behavior Reading List

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

Papers on swarm reinforcement learning, collective behavior, and decentralized coordination in large agent populations.

Swarm RL & Collective Behavior: 10 key papers

1. Learning to flock through reinforcement
   Durve et al. arXiv 2019.
2. Deep Reinforcement Learning for Swarm Systems
   Hüttenrauch et al. arXiv 2018.
3. Learning to Herd Agents Amongst Obstacles: Training Robust Shepherding Behaviors using Deep Reinforcement Learning
   Zhi and Lien. arXiv 2020.
4. Scalable Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for Networked Systems with Average Reward
   Qu et al. arXiv 2020.
5. Learning Vision-based Cohesive Flight in Drone Swarms
   Schilling et al. arXiv 2018.
6. Learning Decentralized Controllers for Robot Swarms with Graph Neural Networks
   Tolstaya et al. arXiv 2019.
7. Graph Neural Networks for Decentralized Multi-Robot Path Planning
   Li et al. arXiv 2019.
8. Learning to Fly in Seconds
   Eschmann et al. arXiv 2023.
9. Scalable Reinforcement Learning Policies for Multi-Agent Control
   Hsu et al. arXiv 2020.
10. Learning Multi-Robot Decentralized Macro-Action-Based Policies via a Centralized Q-Net
    Xiao et al. arXiv 2019.

Related reading lists

• Collective Intelligence
• Communication in Multi-Agent RL
• Emergent Behavior & Self-Organization
• Graph Neural Networks & Message Passing
• World Models and Model-Based RL
• LLM Agents & Tool-Augmented Language Models
• Game Theory for Multi-Agent Systems
• Diffusion Models for Decision Making